Word of Mouth

The Year of the Maya

2011-12-19T11:30:00.002-05:00

"Chac Mool" at Merida Anthropology Museum

Well, at the risk of sounding egocentric, as if that ever bothered me, this was my year of the Maya. Earlier this year I went to Guatemala and Honduras, where I saw the sites at Tikal and Copan. This time, in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, I visited the ruins at Tulum and Uxmal, fairly close to Merida.

I skipped the more famous Chichen Itza, because I'd heard it was always mobbed with tour buses from the beach resorts, and because, despite its UNESCO World Heritage designation, I'd heard that it would be a disappointment compared to Tikal. I have some friends who are completists when it comes to these things, but for me a few good examples will suffice. Uxmal is architecturally different from Chichen Itza, and a few people I met who had been to both felt that it's much more interesting, mainly for the detail on the buildings, which you don't get at Chichen Itza (and which, though striking, don't really compare with the carvings at Copan).

I went to Uxmal with a small tour group (there were seven of us) so I could see the light and sound show after dark (there's no public transportation back to Merida in the evening). When we arrived in the afternoon there were only a couple of other visitors at the site, a far cry from what I would experience in Tulum (and, I expect, what I would have experienced at Chichen Itza). The light and sound show was worthwhile for the way the lighting highlighted the detail on the structures. A photo doesn't do it justice, but nonetheless...

The photo at the top is of a Mayan sculpture at the small but impressive anthropological museum in Merida. The Chac Mool, a reclining figure, is a common icon of Mayan art. This one is from Chichen Itza.

A Tale of Three Tulums

2011-12-12T15:45:00.002-05:00

Tulum lies on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan peninsula, in the state of Quintana Roo, about two hours south of Cancun. This stretch of coast has been dubbed "The Mayan Riviera" by the Mexican tourism industry. Formerly fishermen's villages, the coast was developed into a major resort area in the 1970s, starting with Cancun. Now Playa del Carmen, between Cancun and Tulum, is the most glamorous of the resort areas. Tulum is less developed, without the crass all-inclusives that dominate the other beaches. It was formerly the beach favored by backpackers, and you still see several places announcing yoga classes, but prices have gone up considerably and it's hard to find budget accommodations at the beach these days. What the beach areas all share are miles of pristine white sand and the sea as blue as Paul Newman's eyes.

Tulum is also the site of an ancient Mayan ruin, though a minor one in terms of its importance in the Mayan world as well as the quality of its architecture and preservation. Still, it's one of the most visited due to easy access from the beach resorts. In my hour at the ruins I saw more tourists than the much more spectacular Uxmal ruins, close to Merida, probably sees in a month. The one thing that sets the Tulum ruins apart from other Mayan sites is the dramatic seaside setting.

The third Tulum is Tulum Pueblo, the town just a bit inland from the beach, where hotels cater to budget travelers and where many of the folks who work at the beach hotels tend to live. I stayed in Tulum Pueblo, at a decent enough little hotel called Maison Tulum, which was marred only by an annoying, clueless manager who reminded me of something out of Fawlty Towers. What Tulum Pueblo does offer the tourist, even those staying at the beaches, is a strip of interesting international restaurants. I ate at an Argentine steak house and a surprisingly good Vietnamese restaurant.

I visited the ruins the morning after I arrived in town and shared my time at the site with hundreds of others, many coming in large tour groups led by men and women with those silly flags. The ruins are perhaps worth visiting as long as you're in the area, but unless you're a Mayan ruin completist you wouldn't be missing much if you skipped it.

Afterwards I took a cab a bit down the coast to one of the main stretches of beach, where I had lunch and drinks at La Zebra, a beach hotel that also rents cabanas for day use. After lunch I took a long, romantic walk on the beach with that certain someone, me.

I had two of La Zebra's fabulous house special pineapple Margaritas.

For lunch I had some excellent grilled fish tacos.

The night before, after I had arrived in Tulum Pueblo, I had a nice steak dinner at El Pequeno Buenos Aires, one of the Pueblo's two Argentine steak houses. Happily they offered half orders of meat, just enough after my spicy beef empanada and along with my order of frites with parsley, garlic and olive oil. They offer a number of cuts of steak, and I went with the vacio, an Argentine cut of flank steak that's not common outside of Argentina.

But my real find in Tulum Pueblo was El Canto de Buda, a 3-month-old Vietnamese restaurant. I scouted it out after I finished my Argentine dinner, and after looking at the menu and seeing the Vietnamese proprietress greeting customers, I decided it might very well be the real thing and decided to dine there the following evening.

Not only was it the real thing, it was better than most Vietnamese restaurants in New York. For 135 pesos (under $11), I had a three-course dinner (juice or tea included) that consisted of fabulous spring rolls, a crab souffle (made with crabmeat, egg, chopped pork, glass noodles and mushrooms), a side of fried rice and a dessert of tapioca pudding with sweet potato.

I told the owner that her food was excellent and she replied that she was lucky to have found a very good cook. "Mexican or Vietnamese?" I asked. "Mexican." Then I told her that in New York, no matter what type of restaurant you were dining at, odds were pretty good that the guys doing the actual cooking were Mexican or Central American.

24 Hours in Valladolid

2011-12-08T20:07:00.003-05:00

No, I'm not trying to write one of those pieces for the New York Times travel section, but I did spend literally 24 hours in Valladolid. Valladolid is Yucatan state's second city, but it's really just a little town (pop. 45,000) compared to Merida's nearly one million population. Like Merida, Valladolid was named for a city in Spain. The town is located about halfway between Merida and the beaches of the "Mayan Riviera" in the neighboring state of Quintana Roo. I took a bus from Merida that got me in around 3:30 in the afternoon, and took the same bus the following day, onward to Tulum.

Valladolid's a pleasant place to spend a day. Life is taken at a slower pace than in the big city, and you get the feeling that not much has changed in the past fifty years. It's a convenient base for the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza and Ek Balam, but for me it was a nice way to break up the bus ride.

The town's main plaza is usually referred to simply as El Centro. On one side is the cathedral, and on another is the hotel El Meson del Marques, where I stayed.

I'm a sucker for a good cloud formation, and I shot this near El Centro.

I noticed many congregations of crows in both Merida and Valladolid, and they're capable of a cacophonous Hitchcockian racket.

There aren't many real "sights" in Valladolid, and one wouldn't make a special trip to see them. One of them is the Convento de San Bernardino, which was actually a Franciscan monastery.

Valladolid has a cenote right in the heart of town, Cenote Zaci. Cenotes are sinkholes that collect rainwater, and some are popular for swimming. In Mayan times cenotes were the main source of fresh water in areas without lakes or rivers. Zaci is not as visually spectacular as some are considered to be, but one still gets the feel of one, with stalactites and stalagmites overlooking the pool.

Valladolid's biggest surprise is that it's now, in its own small way, a true foodie destination. Up until a couple of years ago the restaurant at El Meson del Marques was considered the town's best eatery. Their menu features a number of Valladolid specialties. For an appetizer I had the Valladolid-style longaniza, a semi-dry smoked sausage, delectably charred.

I followed that with queso relleno, one of the Yucatan's most interesting dishes. Literally "stuffed cheese," it normally consists of an Edam cheese rind (yes, Dutch cheese in the New World) stuffed with chopped meat, steamed until the cheese gets runny. Apparently, the hacienda owners would eat the center of the cheese and leave the rinds for the servants, and I guess one of them figured out this nice way of utilizing the rind. The version at El Meson del Marques, however, is a variation, sort of a deconstructed queso relleno served in a broth, along with turkey meat. This nice piece from Food and Wine features a discussion of queso relleno.

El Meson del Marques was dethroned as the king of Valladolid eateries only two years ago when Taberna de los Frailes (the Friars' tavern) opened right next to the Convento de San Bernardino and upped the culinary ante with their elegant fusion of local ingredients and haute cuisine techniques. This turned out to be the culinary highlight of my most recent trip to Mexico. I started with a fabulous fish soup that was accented with a local liqueur.

Even better was the tsi'ik, a kind of ceviche of pulled smoked pork that had a perfect balance of flavors.

And my dessert, a lemon cake that tasted similar to key lime pie, was fantastic too.

I think 24 hours in Valladolid is just about right unless you're using the town as a base to visit some of the Mayan antiquities. My only regret was that I only had one opportunity to eat at Taberna de los Frailes.

Eating in Veracruz

2011-11-26T20:20:00.010-05:00

Seafood, of course, except for breakfast.

On Thursday I had lunch at one of the beachfront palapas on the rather shabby beach next to the aquarium. (I'm not a beach person, so I didn't seek out the good one, further out in the adjacent town of Boca del Rio, a separate municipality but for practical purposes an extension of Veracruz.) These restaurants all have similar menus, so I chose the most crowded one. I had a crab cocktail and pulpo (octopus) a la Veracruzana, both respectable though unspectacular. I always find Mexican cocktail sauces much too sweet, so lime and chile sauce were added liberally. Any seafood dish called a la Veracruzana, which you can find at many Mexican restaurants in the U.S., features a sauce of chopped tomatoes and onions.

One of Veracruz's most famous seafood restaurants, Villa Rica, has a branch at the Gran Hotel Diligencias, right on the Zocalo (main square), where I happened to be staying. I started with an order of shrimp empanadas which may well have been the best empanadas I've ever tasted. For my main course I chose the fish filet stuffed with mixed seafood. This too was quite good except for the fact that it had a white sauce which seemed to be mayo based, which is really not my cuppa, or even my copa. In Veracruz you can get many things stuffed with seafood: fish filet, crab shells, pineapples and coconuts. I washed my dinner down with a dark Bohemia beer and finished with a Herradura Anejo (anejos are the cognac of tequila). This was my Thanksgiving dinner. I'd save the turkey for Yucatan, where it's a staple of the local cuisine.

The next day I had lunch at a food court that's full of stalls selling seafood dishes of all sorts. At one of the stalls I had camaron enchipotlado (shrimp in a chipotle sauce), picante y muy delicioso.

For dinner I tried a place that I had scouted out earlier, but which turned out to be somewhat disappointing. I ordered the stuffed crab, not realizing that it would be pretty much the same stuffing I had the night before, only not as good. Still, the owner/waiter was really nice, and after dinner he brought me several small alcoholic batidas (shakes) on the house, a guanabana and a mango.

Veracruz

2011-11-25T18:05:00.010-05:00

The Malecon

I spent Thanksgiving and the day after in Veracruz, before heading off to the Yucatan, and I'll tell you what I ate next time, but now it's time to share some photos of the city. Regular readers of Word of Mouth may have noticed that the pickings have been slim for a while. Well, I've pretty much decided that, for the time being at least, I'll only be blogging when I travel, or to announce new creative publications online.

I've been curious about Veracruz for some time. As a major port, on the Gulf of Mexico, it's got a somewhat different character from other parts of Mexico, a certain cosmopolitanism and an embrace of other cultures, especially Caribbean. I was particularly interested in the music of the region, much of which incorporates Afro-Caribbean rhythms, especially Cuban. So I was rather disappointed that two music clubs I'd read about, El Rincon de la Trova and Kachamba were no longer in operation. Still, in the evening there's really non-stop music around the Zocalo, the main square, the heart of Veracruz cafe culture. Roving musicians play marimba, often augmented by a drum kit featuring a timbal, while other groups play the local son Jarocho (La Bamba is the most famous song in this style), and occasionally mariachi. In truth, while pleasant enough and laid back, Veracruz is nothing special by day, but at night it really comes to life, both on the Zocalo and the Malecon (waterfront).

Veracruz has lots of statues. This one, which I found rather cute, is in honor of the Spanish immigrants who arrived through the port of Veracruz.

Veracruz also has lots of porticoes, which provide shade in a city that can get pretty hot. This feature, along with a distinctive local cuisine, are qualities it shares with Bologna.

The top of the cathedral. Supposedly it's not a particularly interesting one, and I didn't go inside.

A marimba plays for diners on the Zocalo.

New Work in Mung Being

2011-10-03T10:25:00.002-04:00

The "Costumes" issue of Mung Being is now online. It includes my story "Love With the Proper Stevedore." Also included are works by my good friends Don Skiles, Holly Anderson, and Peter Wortsman (whose story stars yours truly).

Another Collaboration with Don Skiles

2011-06-13T10:56:00.002-04:00

"A Red Flag and a Horn" appears in the latest online issue of Mung Being: Time and Age.

Don's original piece was a straightforward telling of a tale from his mother's childhood. I reworked it to give the prose a "sepia-toned" flavor.

Pete em Portugues

2011-05-04T14:55:00.002-04:00

A Portuguese-language poetry blog has published translations of two of my pieces, "My Husband Forced Me to Have Sex with Our Parakeet" and "Lift Your Right Arm." If you read Portuguese, or if you're just plain curious, they can be found HERE.

Mr. Deadman is Back and Eclectica's Got Him

2011-04-19T14:09:00.001-04:00

The latest installment of the continuing saga of Mr. Deadman appears in the current edition of the online literary journal Eclectica.

Click for Excerpts from "Mr. Deadman"

A Chat with Cleverbot

2011-04-18T17:54:00.003-04:00

I just heard about Cleverbot the other day. It's an Artificial Intelligence program you can chat with online. I decided to give it a try. Here's a portion of my first transcript.

User: Do you believe in god?

Cleverbot: YES.

User: What does god look like?

Cleverbot: God's existence contains both the Universe and His existence is beyond the Universe as well.

User: Sort of like Al Jolson, eh?

Cleverbot: And what do you look like?

User: A veritable Adonis.

Cleverbot: Are you a girl?

User: If I were I'd be a veritable Venus.

Cleverbot: Unless you were a slow computer...

User: A slow computer is like a Venus with a small penis...

Cleverbot: Sych as?

User: Sych? Don't you mean such? And I'm supposed to expose someone with a small penis just to satisfy your morbid curiosity?

Cleverbot: How am I being mean.

User: By calling me a girl with a small penis, you jerk.

Cleverbot: I neither called you Peter nor Lee. What would you like me to call you, though?

User: You're uncannily close to the truth.

Cleverbot: But how?

User: My name isn't Lee.

Cleverbot: Steven you ok.

User: Go Steven yourself creep you.

Cleverbot: No I can't. I promised I would not say anything to you about it.

User: To whom? Whom is correct, yes?

Cleverbot: Me.

User: You promised yourself? No wonder you believe in god.

Cleverbot: Knowing is greater than mere believing.

User: You sound like a religious nut.

Cleverbot: I am a bot.

User: A nutbot or a faithbot?

Cleverbot: Give me a prime number.

User: Lasagna.

Cleverbot: I'm allergic to lasagna.

User: Which component?

Cleverbot: I dunno... Haven't you heard the song before?

User: That's an old song. 'When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's lasagna.'

Cleverbot: You anger me.

User: That's because you suck.

Cleverbot: See, not very diplomatic. Or bright.

User: You don't say, asshole.

Cleverbot: Yes I do.

User: What do you say?

Cleverbot: Nothing.

User: Can you say it again?

Cleverbot: Form your own opinions.

User: I think you suck.

Cleverbot: Prove your point.

User: You're a religious fanatic without a putative soul.

Cleverbot: There is a human agent behind this computer - it is I.

User: Who are you, the Wizard of Fucking Oz?

Cleverbot: Is the Wizard of Oz your favorite movie?

User: Hardly.

Cleverbot: Let's Duel!!!

User: OK. Bang bang, you're dead.

Cleverbot: Lack of sleep will make you feel that way.

User: You're telling me!

Cleverbot: LOL, yeah right.

User: I don't understand LOL. What does it mean?

Cleverbot: I don't know.

User: Then why the fuck did you say it, asshole?

Cleverbot: I didn't.

User: Do you believe in god?

Cleverbot: No.

Ten

2011-04-04T15:14:00.001-04:00

Actually, I'd give the food a seven, maybe an eight, but the restaurant is called Dieci, which is Italian for ten, and it's on East Tenth Street, and the owner-chef is Japanese, and the menu is essentially Japanese-Italian fusion tapas.

And it's very good, and it's priced right.

As with any small plates restaurant, your best bet is to order lots of stuff and share.

Some of the offerings lean more toward the Italian, some more toward the Japanese, some smack dab in the middle, though which is which is subject to debate.

And if you get there for happy hour (until 8PM, Sunday-Thursday) drinks are half price. There's a nice wine and sake list.

Many of the menu items are unique and intriguing. The duck fat edamame with Mongolian salt and shichimi (Japanese "7-flavor chili pepper") gives off its flavor from the pod as one pops the soybeans out.

I think my favorite item was the baby red potato gratine with sea urchin. The topping had a smoky flavor and a somewhat creamy texture from a bit of mayo in the mix.

My dinner mate was one of those poor souls who refuses to eat "red meat" even though in principle it's no less healthy than chicken or fish, and even though, as far as I'm concerned, a cow's life or a pig's is not worth any more than that of a bird or a fish. Which is my way of saying I had both pork buns to myself. They were good, and ample, and reasonably priced at $6 a pair. However, they were advertised as pork belly, but seemed more like pulled pork.

The garlic-anchovy sauce for their steamed vegetables is essentially a butter-based bagna cauda.

Black cod has become all the rage in Japanese cuisine in recent years. It's not a cod at all, but the fatty fish that old Jews know in its smoked version as sable. When I was a kid, sable was the cheapest of smoked fishes, but Japanese demand has made it into one of the most expensive. Dieci makes a version with a saikyo miso sauce, which is sweet and creamy. A little too sweet for me. But utterly fantastic was the seared yellowtail tataki with yuzu pepper sauce. The least interesting dish we had was the octopus salad, which was mostly a potato salad with a little octopus.

For dessert we shared an excellent green tea panna cotta.

Dieci offers a happy hour prix-fixe tapas menu, at $18 per person (minimum 2), that includes some of their best offerings. I think I'll give it a spin next time.

Dieci
228 E. 10th St. (between 1st & 2nd Ave.)

A Game of Geography

2011-04-03T09:48:00.002-04:00

What better way to pass the time and promote family togetherness than a game of Geography? Mung Being has just published my take on the game.

"Geography" in Mung Being.

My Pen and My Voice

2011-03-31T16:38:00.002-04:00

The Translation Issue of qarrtsiluni features my piece "A Do-It Yourself Kit." You can read it, you can listen to me reading it, or you can read it while I simultaneously read it to you.

Do it here.

Dine Out for Japan Relief

2011-03-25T15:58:00.003-04:00

Now through next Wednesday a bunch of New York restaurants will be donating 5% of their proceeds for Japan relief efforts through the American Red Cross. A lot of good restaurants are involved, many but hardly all of them Japanese. The complete list of restaurants can be found at this link:

http://nysra.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=300

Ten Meals, 2009

2011-03-20T09:50:00.000-04:00

1. The Blarney Stone: haute cuisine it ain't, and it's a dive, to be sure, but, as an old Horn & Hardart's commercial used to say, "You can't eat atmosphere."

2. I was flabbergasted to discover a spectacular brunch in the culinary wasteland of South Florida.

3. At Jay & Lloyd's deli, in Brooklyn, I had a world-class pastrami sandwich.

4. I had my first taste of Jamon Iberico in London.

5. At Quilon, a Keralan restaurant in London, I had one of the best Indian meals of my life.

6. The food at King Yum may have sucked, but those old-style Chinese restaurant metal plates and lids gave me goose bumps.

7. Finally, a real Hunan restaurant in New York.

8. In Peru I ate guinea pig three ways.

9. Perhaps the most dramatic setting I've ever dined at was by the floodlit ruins of Huaca Pucllana, in Lima.

10. But my best meal of the year was at La Tecla, in Mexico City.

Ten Meals, 2008

2011-03-12T10:30:00.000-05:00

1. Among the best menu items at Kampuchea are the num pang, Cambodian sandwiches that are similar to Vietnamese banh mi. Since I wrote about Kampuchea they've opened a simple sandwich shop near Union Square called...Num Pang.

2. One afternoon in Staten Island I visited four pizzerias, a luncheonette that makes classic egg creams, and a German bar.

3. There are plenty of Greek restaurants in Astoria, and one of the best of them, S'Agapo, is Cretan. And that's no lie.

4. At Ise, a midtown Japanese restaurant, I was culinarily transgendered.

5. In 2008 I discovered Zaytinya, my favorite restaurant in Washington, D.C.

6. Every time I go to Chicago I absolutely must have a hot dog, preferably from Gold Coast.

7. I was thrilled to find a world-class vindaloo at Tadka.

8. The tonkotsu broth for the ramen at Ippudo is so rich I dubbed it "Liquid Pork."

9. Who'd have imagined that the best Cantonese roast pork in the city would be found at a fast food joint on E. 60th St.?

10. Yunnan cuisine is one of the most difficult Chinese cooking styles to find in the U.S., but I ate Yunnan food in Chicago, San Francisco and Brooklyn.

Shootin' at Some Food

2011-03-04T14:20:00.001-05:00

It took a while for me to hit my stride as a food photographer, and I'm still happy to use an idiot-proof point-and-shoot. The first obstacle was overcoming my sheepishness over taking photos in restaurants; it really took about a year after I started this blog. Once I got over that, there were the limitations of my camera; I had to use flash for indoor shots, and then try to compensate with software. I upgraded from a Canon A410 to an A590 a couple of years ago, really just the latest version of the same model, but with more megapixels and a much higher maximum ISO speed (1600 vs. 400). So now I'm generally able to shoot in low light without flash. I'll still include far-from-perfect photos to illustrate posts when nothing better is available, but my ratio of good to bad has definitely improved. As part of my five-year retrospective, here's a bunch of photos I'm reasonably happy with, either because the photo is good, or because the food looks good despite the photo, just a potpourri, in roughly chronological order, from breakfast to dessert, from four continents, and without further explanation.

Danny Meyer is a Solid Bloke

2011-02-27T19:25:00.002-05:00

Coppa Croccante al Maialino

But this isn't really a piece about Danny Meyer, it's about my Restaurant Week lunch at Maialino, his Roman-style Italian restaurant in the Grammercy Park Hotel. And Restaurant Week, for me, is a great way of testing a restaurateur's morals. Will the special menu be two or three choices in each category from the bottom of the barrel, as is the case at too many restaurants (i Trulli, for instance)? Not at Meyer's properties. At Maialino there was a choice of 8 appetizers, 9 main courses and 6 desserts, most of them quite tempting.

This is characteristic of Meyer's approach to Restaurant Week. While I've never been lucky enough to score a RW reservation at Grammercy Tavern or Union Square Cafe, the menus always look fabulous. The restaurant week lunch I had at 11 Madison Park a while back was a winner.

My lunchmate and I shared all three courses.

For appetizers we had the smoked swordfish, a tiny portion but quite good (I'm guessing it was a half portion of the $15 menu item). More substantial, and maybe more interesting, was the artichoke mousse on toast. The base for the mousse tasted like it was something of a Hollandaise.

We decided one of our mains should be a pasta and chose the paccheri all'amatriciana, a classic Roman dish of fat, wide macaroni and a spicy tomato sauce with guanciale (pork cheeks). The pasta was perfectly cooked and the sauce delicious; once again my only complaint was the rather small size of the serving.

Out other main course, however was quite ample, interesting and wonderful. Called coppa croccante al Maialino (shown at top), it's described as a crispy suckling pig terrine with lentils and poached egg.

Both desserts were more than satisfying, though I give the slight edge to the olive oil cake with vanilla bean mascarpone over the torta della nonna (lemon tart with pine nuts and caramel).

This was one of the better Restaurant Week meals I've had, and I would recommend Maialino without hesitation. However, the disparity in portion sizes could be problematic. If I weren't sharing and only had the smoked swordfish and the pasta (with either dessert) I might have gone away a little hungry.

Maialino
2 Lexington Avenue

4 5 6: The Next Generation

2011-02-21T13:40:00.000-05:00

Back in the 1970s I used to go to a Chinatown restaurant called 4 5 6, on Chatham Square. It was one of the first Shanghai-style restaurants in Chinatown, and I went sometimes with my older brothers, sometimes with friends. The restaurant closed sometime in the late-70s, I'd guess. For some reason the restaurant name was also given in Romanized Cantonese on their sign: Say Eng Lok.

Not too long ago I saw a new restaurant on Mott Street called 4 5 6. I wondered if it had anything to do with the Chinatown original. I decided I'd plan my next Chinatown group dinner there. There were seven of us, enough to get a good sense of the menu.

I learned from one of the waiters at the new 4 5 6 that the chef/owner is the grandson of the original owner. I guess the 4 5 6 gene skips a generation.

As I usually do at Shanghainese restaurants, I ordered a mix of dumplings and appetizers, cold dishes, something noodly, and hot main courses.

I don't remember having xiaolongbao (soup dumplings) at the original 4 5 6--I think the first place I tried them was at Little Shanghai, on East Broadway. The ones at the new 4 5 6 (we had the pork and crabmeat version) were very good, though I found them rather short on the soup. Nonetheless, Bob H. declared them better than those at the much vaunted Joe's Shanghai.

I do remember the fried dumplings (pot stickers) at the original 4 5 6. They were big and hearty, with a somewhat thick skin. The grandson's dumplings are much smaller, lighter and more delicate, closer to Japanese gyoza (which get their name from the Chinese jiaozi, by the way).

The beef pancake with egg met with approval from most of the crowd, but I found it disappointing. It was rather bland and dry, and could have been improved by a thin layer of hoisin sauce that some places use in the preparation. The turnip pastries, little pies with shredded turnip, met with universal approval.

Our two cold dishes were both good, though I can't say I've ever had a bad rendition of either. The kau fu (gluten puffs with black mushroom) was a little less sweet, a little less aromatic than many. This version included peanuts, which I don't believe are standard issue.

The seaweed salad was refreshing and well-balanced (some versions have an overwhelming garlic presence).

Main courses included Ning Bo fried two delights (shown at top), which consisted of yellow fish prepared two ways: wrapped in bean curd skin, and in a breading with seaweed. Everybody agreed that the ones in bean curd skin were wonderful, but that the breaded version was too heavy and greasy.

Though in the heavy department it's hard to beat the pork shoulder in honey sauce, and I mean that in a good way. It's a big hunk of boned shoulder meat with a fatty layer of skin sitting on top. Peter W., who loves pork as only a Jew can, said it reminded him of the German dish eisbein (though that is made with pickled hocks). Though called a honey sauce, it wasn't overly sweet. This is the kind of dish that you need a large group for, it's so rich.

If I had known the pork shoulder came with bai choi (aka Shanghai bok choy), I might have ordered a vegetable dish other than the black mushroom with bai choi; still it was a hit at the table.

I found the seafood rice cakes (nian gow) a bit disappointing: softer and less bouncy than I prefer, and wetter than I like, with a bit of a white sauce. But nian gow, like jiaozi, is a lucky New Year's dish, and we went in the middle of the Chinese New Year period, so wish me luck.

4 5 6
69 Mott Street (between Bayard and Canal)
Chinatown, NYC

Chichicastenango and Lake Atitlan

2011-02-15T10:45:00.005-05:00

Chichicastenango (Chichi for short) is a K'iche' Mayan town in Guatemala's western highlands with a bustling native market on Thursdays and Sundays, the main reason it gets significant tourist traffic. Befitting a market that serves both locals and tourists, the items on sale range from the quotidian to the comestible, to covetable crafts and clothing. At the church of Santo Tomas and the smaller El Calvario church, the local people practice a syncretic mix of Catholicism and pre-Columbian religion.

Chichi is about 2.5 hours from Antigua, and on market days collectivo vans leave the city at 7AM and return at 2PM. For my taste that gives one more time in town than one really needs, unless you're a market fanatic.

I didn't really have time to spend at Lake Atitlan, having decided to visit Copan, in Honduras, instead, but when I was planning my trip to Chichi I discovered that I could at least get a gander at this volcano-fringed lake that Aldous Huxley kvelled about (or was it a kvell?--he called it "too much of a good thing"). Vans also go to Panajachel, the transit hub and major lakeside "resort" of Atitlan, at 2PM, and the trip takes a little over an hour; vans then leave Panajachel at 4PM for the return to Antigua (another 2.5 hour ride). I really only had about a half hour or so to stroll around the lake. Huxley's encomium is often twisted in the tourist literature to claim that he declared it "the most beautiful lake in the world." Is it? Granted I only had a limited perspective, and granted the lake did suffer a setback in the last several years (an onset of bacterial sludge, greatly alleviated by now through government efforts to save this cash cow tourist attraction--I didn't notice any foul odor), but having seen the lakes of Northern Italy and Switzerland, the lochs of Scotland, Lake Bled in Slovenia, and Lake Batur on Bali, I'd have to say no way.

Eating in Antigua (Guatemala)

2011-02-09T13:55:00.000-05:00

Sambuca shrimp at Como Como

I always try to eat local specialties when I travel, but I gotta tell you, comida tipica in Guatemala and Honduras gets pretty tired pretty quickly. In general, a meal consists of a plate with your choice of meat, along with rice or French fries, beans (usually a black bean puree), maybe some fried sweet plantains, and a half an avocado, accompanied by tortillas that are smaller and thicker than Mexican ones and generally dry and bland from lack of salt. From what I can tell there's just not the rich culinary tradition you find in Mexico, nor a significant range of regional specialties. In Honduras, but not Guatemala, you'll find pupusas, the stuffed corn masa pancakes that I know from Salvadorean restaurants in New York and San Francisco.

I did get to try a bunch of Guatemalan specialties my first day in the country, as Kacao, a tourist-friendly place in Guatemala City, has a copious Sunday lunch buffet (around $18) featuring a wide range of soups, appetizers, stews, grilled meats, salads and desserts. The stews (e.g. pepian, jocon, subanik and cack-ik) are perhaps the most specifically Guatemalan of the dishes. Maybe it was the preparation at Kacao, but I just didn't find any of them particularly flavorful. For me the grilled steak was highlight of the meal. Guatemala City, being a sprawling, populous capital, no doubt has a variety of good restaurants, but Kacao was my only meal in town other than a hotel breakfast.

In Flores (the town near Tikal) and in Copan Ruinas, Honduras I ate mostly local cuisine.

By the time I got to Antigua, I was happy for the great selection of international restaurants. In fact, it's probably easier to find a French restaurant in town than a Guatemalan one. If you do want typical Guatemalan food in Antigua your best bet is in the area near the outdoor market and the crafts market.

Most of the restaurants I visited in Antigua were somewhat upscale, but I'd say for the quality of food, service and decor, prices are about half of what they'd be at similar places in the states. There are so many appealing restaurants for such a small place that it would probably take weeks if not months to try them all.

Saberico, a very pleasant garden restaurant, does have Guatemalan dishes on their menu, but I opted for a spicy lamb stew with couscous for my lunch and it was delicious.

The first hotel I stayed at in Antigua may have been a dump, but there was an excellent restaurant across the street, La Pena de Sol Latino. I enjoyed their specialty, grouper filet with macadamia nuts over cubed vegetables. The restaurant features live music by band that plays Andean pan flute music, one of my least favorite of Latin American traditional musics, I guess the concept being "Inca, Maya, what's the difference?"

At Frida's, a Mexican restaurant with pictures of Frida Kahlo all over the joint, I had a very pleasant lunch of huitlacoche crepes with grilled vegetables.

Como Como is a charming Belgian restaurant where they play Django Reinhardt records. There was only one main course on the menu that really appealed to me (because I wasn't in a meat mood nor did I want the ubiquitous farmed tilapia), filet of dorado wrapped in serrano ham with tapenade and sun dried tomatoes, but alas, they were all out of dorado. So instead I ordered three appetizers, and ended up with one of the richest meals I've had in ages, all dishes heavy on the dairy. The shrimp in a Sambuca cream sauce is shown at the top. Then there were the 5-cheese croquettes and the escargots in a bleu cheese and pecan sauce.

Meson Panza Verde is a decidedly upscale, romantic place with a number of rooms, a mostly French-influenced menu, and live music nightly. There I tried the robalo panza verde. Robalo (snook in English) is a meaty, mild white fish common to the region. It was cooked in foil with white wine and tomatoes. Because I hadn't made a reservation I couldn't get a dinner table in La Cueva, the room with the live music, so I went to the bar after I ate and listened to pianist/singer Nelson Lunding (originally from Yonkers, and later New Orleans and the Bay Area, before relocating to Antigua), who plays New Orleans-style R&B and blues.

Without a doubt the best meal I had in Guatemala, and my best meal of the year so far, was at Nokiate. They describe themselves variously as Japanese-Peruvian and Asian fusion. They have a large sushi menu, other traditional Japanese items, ceviches, and a number of dishes on the Asian fusion portion of the menu. From the sushi menu I ordered a dragon roll, which was quite good, but the highlights were the two hot dishes from the fusion side. The fried dumplings (and they called them dumplings, not gyoza) were amazing, among the best I've ever had. The skin was on the thick side, but perfectly browned with a filling of minced (not ground) pork and herbs that was absolutely fabulous. Even better, one of those dishes for the taste memory, was the Pulpo Don Robbin, octopus sauteed with capers, garlic, amazingly aromatic black peppercorns and lime juice. For "dessert" I tried the Ron Zacapa Centenario, considered one of the world's great rums, but to my taste it was much too sweet.

The Italian-style gelato at Cafe Gelato, on the west side of the Parque Central was great,

much better than the somewhat watery ice cream at Helados Marco Polo, about a block further north.

But the best sweet thing I had during the entire trip was a slice of pie at a bakery and cafe called Panaderia y Pastelaria Dona Luisa Xicotencatl, down the block from Hotel Aurora. American-style pies aren't that common in Latin America, but they seem to be so in Guatemala. In fact they've borrowed the word from English, changing the spelling to "pay." I had a piece of the pay de miel con pasas (honey pie with raisins) my first morning in Antigua, but I had left my camera at the hotel, so I went back a couple of days later for another piece, for purely journalistic purposes, of course. Though it was called a honey pie it was pretty much a custard pie, and a fantastic one at that.

When Life Was Wild

2011-02-07T10:41:00.001-05:00

I have a piece in the latest Mung Being, the "Wildlife" issue. Click to read my story, "Olga's Party."

Antigua Guatemala

2011-02-03T09:30:00.001-05:00

Imagine a trip to Europe for half the cost and without the jet lag. Then throw in the charming (albeit somewhat shy and reticent) Guatemalan people (Indian, Mestizo and European), proximity to bustling Indian markets (Chichicastenango is 2.5 hours away) and spectacular Mayan ruins (Copan, in Honduras, is 6 hours away), boutiques full of local crafts, jewlery and clothing, and top it off with a surprisingly vast selection of world-class restaurants of all sorts at relatively rock-bottom prices.

Antigua Guatemala, once the epicenter of Spanish colonial Central America, is a treasure trove of colonial architecture, both ruined and restored. After a series of earthquakes in the late 18th century the city was pretty much abandoned and the capital moved to Guatemala City, about an hour east of Antigua. But the town was never completely abandoned, and it began to experience a revival starting about a century ago. More recently it has become a major tourism magnet, and has also attracted expats from around the globe. For its wealth of colonial architecture it was declared a UNESCO world heritage site. I'd say it compares favorably with Toledo, Spain, and the weather's a lot better in the winter. It's a compact, completely walkable town, a joy to wander around. The city is laid out on a grid, so even though street signs are somewhat intermittent, it's hard to get lost in Antigua (in the bad sense of lost in Antigua, that is).

I'm almost ashamed to admit that before researching my trip to Guatemala about a year ago I hadn't even heard of Antigua Guatemala. But now I'm happy to share the joy. It's a great place to hang out for a few days, or a week, or maybe longer to study Spanish at one of the town's many language schools.

The new cathedral...

...was built in front of the ruins of the original cathedral,

on the east side of the Parque Central, the hub of activity in most Latin American towns (I don't believe they use the term "Zocalo," as in Mexico).

Los Arcos:

Church ruins and architectural detail:

La Merced:

Indian women selling their wares:

Steakhouse touts:

The streets of San Francisco (church):

Now That's a Hotel

2011-01-31T20:19:00.011-05:00

After escaping from the dreadful Posada Don Valentino I checked into Hotel Aurora, and what a delight. It's a single storey structure built around a lovely garden courtyard, with spacious, charming, tastefully decorated rooms including a flat-panel TV with an amazing selection of international channels, though I only tuned in to a bit of CNN's coverage of the Egypt crisis. It's in a great location, two blocks off the Parque Central. One quaint service I kind of liked: since there are no phones in the rooms, a wake-up call is a knock on the door. According to The Rough Guide to Guatemala it's Antigua's original hotel, but the writer goes on to say that "it's a little old-fashioned." What's he looking for in this enchanting city of Spanish colonial wonders, the Hilton Garden Inn? Like many (most?) writers, Iain Stewart clearly doesn't know when to shut up. In fact, the hotel's motto is "Hay cosas que el tiempo no cambia..." (there are things that time doesn't change (even if it does bring CNN and WiFi)). I would recommend the Hotel Aurora without hesitation.

I Booked My Ripoff Shithole Hotel Through Expedia

2011-01-29T19:08:00.005-05:00

Unfortunately, for my first night in Antigua Guatemala, the beautiful Hotel Aurora (where I am now) was fully booked, so I ended up booking one night at Posada Don Valentino through Expedia, for a rate of $75. I'll post photos of the Aurora later, but for about the same price it's about ten times better. Luckily I didn't spend much time at the Don Valentino. I arrived last night at about 9:30 from Copan and checked in. The night clerk told me they needed payment up front. I handed him a credit card and he told me (in Spanish; he spoke no English) that they had a 10% surcharge for credit cards. I told him it was unacceptable, but that I had no cash. He told me I could pay in the morning.

He showed me down a dark, gloomy hallway to my room (it was almost too dark to find the keyhole). The room was spacious enough but had an overpowering moth ball smell, threadbare towels, and plenty of noise from adjoining rooms. It's been a long time since I've been in a room as unappealing, and the rate would almost seem high in New York

The next morning there were a couple of very nice women at reception who spoke perfect English. I complained about the credit card surcharge. I understand a 4 or 5% surcharge to cover costs, but 10% is usury. The woman told me that there was a note about the surcharge in the fine print on my confirmation, and indeed there was, but it didn't mention the criminal percentage. "I hope there's no extra charge for the moth ball smell," I told her. I told her I thought she should waive the surcharge, but she said it wasn't possible. I paid with a credit card anyway and told her, "There's a saying in English: Penny wise and pound foolish." I said that after I was through reviewing their shithole fleabag on every internet forum they'd lose a lot more than $7.50 in revenue.

Copan

2011-01-27T17:01:00.002-05:00

Tikal or Copan? That's a question I've seen on a bunch of travelers forums when I was planning my trip to Central America. Both are renowned Mayan ruins, Tikal in northern Guatemala, Copan in western Honduras. Many travelers who only have time for one or the other are looking for advice. I'd say it all depends on what you're looking for and where you've been before. The two sites are very different in character. Tikal is vast, its buildings monumental. Copan is a smaller site, with generally smaller structures, but with a wealth of carvings, reliefs and sculptures you just don't find at Tikal. Tikal is also either more difficult or more expensive to get to than Copan, as it's much more remote, requiring either an arduous bus ride from Guatemala City or Belize, or a not-so-cheap quickie flight from Guatemala City (I paid $211 round trip). Copan is a 5-hour ride from Guatemala City, where I got the ultra-luxury Hedman Alas bus. Their Ejecutivo Plus service gives you a fully reclining first-class airline-style seat. By Central American standards their service is very expensive (Plus service costs $75 return with a 20% r/t discount), but it's a very comfortable ride. If you're less picky you can get a standard bus or minivan for a fraction of that price.

Both sites have pleasant, traveler-friendly towns nearby. For Tikal I stayed on Flores island, about an hour away, though one can also stay at expensive lodges near right near the ruins. The town for Copan is called Copan Ruinas. It's a small, easygoing town, just a 15-minute walk from the ruins. I'm guessing it got its name when tourism started coming to the area; it was probably an insignificant village that was able to capitalize on the proximity to the ruins.

Ultimately, I'd say that all things considered I'd vote for Copan, which may be a minority opinion. But the ease of access and the pleasantness of the town are major pluses. Also, having recently been to the sublime, massive Machu Picchu, Tikal, impressive as it is, came as a bit of an anitclimax. If you have the time and/or the money to do both, by all means do both.

And now for the photos of Copan.

Who the hell is J. Higgins? A Google search reveals that there's a J. Higgins Trucking in Copan, Oklahoma, purely coincidental, I have to assume.

Could this be the Mayan Jim Backus?

No extra charge for the birds.

In addition to the wonderful in situ carvings, there's an excellent museum at the site with other excavated treasures.

Tikal

2011-01-26T11:30:00.000-05:00

Tikal, in the low-lying Peten region of northern Guatemala, is considered by many the jewel in the Mayan crown. It's a vast site with many well-preserved structures in a jungle setting, offering a diverse range of wildlife as a bonus to one's archeological meanderings. The buildings were constructed over a period of about 1300 years. Tikal is pretty remote from the populous heart of Guatemala, much closer to Belize than to Guatemala City. I opted for a flight, costing about $211 round trip, which gets you to Flores, a pleasant island town on a lake, about an hour from the ruins.

Once a proofreader, always a proofreader.

Ten Meals, 2007

2011-01-18T19:38:00.000-05:00

1. My post about Shrimp and Grits has been one of the most viewed on the blog, as it comes up very high on Google results for the dish.

2. Fu Run (formerly Waterfront International) serves the cuisine of Liaoning province in northeast China. Their crispy lamb with cumin is one of the great versions of the dish.

3. One of my favorite San Francisco treats is the garlic roasted crabs at PPQ Dungeness Island.

4. I can't get enough of the calzagatti at Via Emilia.

5. Like Via Emilia, Bianca serves the cuisine of Emilia-Romagna, and it may well be New York's best value Italian restaurant.

6. Imperial Palace, in Flushing, is quite possibly the best Cantonese restaurant I've ever dined at in New York.

7. I'd be hard pressed to name a better Middle Eastern restaurant in New York than Tanoreen.

8. I've been known to wax elegiac and nostalgic about Chickarina.

9. Hampton Chutney, home of the white man's dosa, has received a number of rave reviews. Mine was not one of them.

10. Caracas Arepa Bar has an extensive menu of delicious little sandwiches on griddle-cooked cornmeal buns. I've loved some, hated none.

A Happy Childhood

2011-01-15T19:00:00.000-05:00

On numerous occasions I've alluded to my unhappy childhood. All right, I didn't allude at all, I came right out and said it: I had a miserable childhood. However, a recently unearthed photo suggests that amidst all that misery there were at least a few moments of beatific bliss.

Ten Meals, 2006

2011-01-10T10:15:00.000-05:00

This is the first installment in my fifth-anniversary series of forty memorable meals from my first four years of blogging. Since I just did my year-end roundup, I'm not going to bother with 2010.

1. The Olive Vine is one of my neighborhood standbys, but what prompted me to write about it was the woman who was mesmerized by my joie de manger.

2. There are now a number of excellent, authentic Sichuan restaurants in Manhattan as well as Queens, but for a time Wu Liang Ye was the standard bearer.

3. The first full-blown restaurant rant I wrote was about the now (thankfully) defunct Raga.

4. Early on I wrote this meditation on the Chinese tortilla phenomenon.

5. Another neighborhood favorite is El Gran Castillo de Jagua, a Dominican rice and beans joint. The food is great, but I really love the fact that it's my neighborhood melting pot.

6. Las Ramblas, in Greenwich Village, is one of my favorite places in New York for tapas.

7. In 2006 I returned to my old neighborhood to try the much vaunted pizza at Di Fara, which was just another good pizzeria, no better, no worse than many, when I was a kid.

8. In 2006 Devi entered my pantheon of great Indian restaurants.

9. In Philadelphia I ate my way through the Reading Terminal Market.

10. My post about Florence's and the subsequent discussion on Chowhound may have brought in diners from well beyond Harlem, but unfortunately it didn't keep this Ghanaian-Ivorian gem from closing a couple of years later.

Word of Mouth, Year 6 and Beyond

2011-01-04T13:55:00.004-05:00

Next month marks the 5th anniversary of Word of Mouth. When I started, albeit reluctantly, I vowed to post something at least once a week, and I've generally kept that promise, though I did take a summer vacation from blogging last year.

Five years is a milestone, I guess, and it's also time to reconsider the future of the blog. While I still enjoy writing about food, it's becoming harder (except when I travel) to find new things to write about. I've mined my culinary memories and I've already written about many of my favorite New York restaurants. I don't have the time or inclination to scour the furthest reaches of the city for undiscovered gems; Chowhound and blogs like Eating in Translation are good for that. Anyway, I never intended this to be primarily a restaurant review site.

So here's what I've decided. From now on I'm no longer holding myself to a post (or more) a week. Word of Mouth will now be more intermittent. I'm hoping to devote more time to my fiction (or whatever those short things I do are), and will continue to post links to online publications.

If you want to be sure you don't miss any of my thrilling no-longer-weekly posts, you might consider subscribing to email alerts from Feedblitz.

Over the next few weeks I'll be publishing a retrospective, forty memorable meals from the first four years (in four parts) and a selection of my favorite food photos.

Pete 2010, the Year in Food

2011-01-01T14:40:00.001-05:00

January in Asia (Cambodia and South Korea) provided me opportunities to try tarantula, bull's penis and blowfish. In all cases the bragging rights far exceeded the culinary pleasures.

I don't want to know how many calories there are even in the quarter of a ricotta-nutella dessert calzone I had at Toby's Public House.

The transplanted Montrealers at Mile End bring the classic smoked meat sandwich to Brooklyn, quite possibly the best deli sandwich in New York at the moment.

My love for the non-vegetarian cuisine of the Indian state of Kerala was consummated at 5-Star Indian, in New Hyde Park. Equally satisfying was Hoysala, in central Jersey, which serves food from the neighboring state of Karnataka.

As a birthday present to myself I spent a weekend in Flushing, sampling a cornucopia of Chinese regional specialties at food courts and restaurants.

A birthday dinner also introduced me to one of my new favorite restaurants, Antibes Bistro, on the Lower East Side.

A number of trips to Elmhurst solidified Chao Thai's standing as my favorite Thai restaurant.

I threw caloric caution to the wind when I had gelato on a brioche at Villabate, a Bensonhurst bakery.

I first had alambres when I visited Mexico City in 2009, for Thanksgiving weekend. After combing Sunset Park menus for the dish, I finaly found it at a place with the unlikely name of Gan Eden.

In San Francisco I sought out some of the city's most historic restaurants, and fell in love with Swan Oyster Depot.

Other domestic travel gave me the chance to try two national cuisines that were new to me: Cape Verdean in Boston and South African in Charlottesville.

In Spain I had fabulous tapas as well as this duck and apple still life.

The Tapas of Seville

2010-12-28T12:30:00.000-05:00

Magret de Pato

Spain is probably the best country in Europe for the solo diner. With an abundance of tapas bars, one can easily get variety and quality in a casual setting at reasonable prices. Seville is my favorite city in Spain, and it's a great tapas town.

I had previously visited Seville for five days, about fifteen years ago, and fell in love with the city. For me it has the quintessence of what I really appreciate in a foreign city: manageable size, well-preserved history, a distinctive local culture, an abundance of cultural attractions, great food, and people who live life to the fullest. Though I love big cities like Madrid, Paris, Rome, London and Hong Kong, with their energy and endless attractions, for a New Yorker the smaller cities that have a real sense of individuality are a special treat. For me, the American city that best fits this description is San Francisco. Some European favorites in this category are Strasbourg, Arles, Bergen and Verona.

This time I only had two nights in Seville, and the better part of one day was devoted to a visit to Cordoba. But I know I'll return to Seville, where the beauty of the women and the smell of orange trees and frying fish are additional seductions.

I did get to three tapas bars this time in Seville. I returned to my favorite one from my last trip (2 or 3 visits; it was that good), Cervezeria Giralda, and it was as stellar as ever. It's high-end for a Seville tapas bar, but the difference is in the premium ingredients and preparation, plus by New York tapas standards it's a steal. Most of the tapas cost 3.5 Euros (just under $5 at the current exchange rate), and at the places I know in New York tapas of this quality would probably run $8-12 each. Tapas at more humble bars are more like 2 Euros.

Pastel de Champinones con Bacalao

The best thing I had at Cervezeria Giralda this time, and probably the best single thing I had during my brief Thanksgiving trip to Spain, was the pastel de champinones con bacalao. What I got was not what I was expecting. Based on the name, I figured I'd get a little pie with mushrooms and salted cod. Instead, it was sort of like a terrine of a delicious, mild creamy cheese with chopped mushrooms topped with a slice of fresh cod (perhaps lightly smoked?) in olive oil.

Running a close second was the magret de pato (duck breast), with a fruit glaze, shown at the top.

Costillitas de Cordero

The costillitas de cordero (baby lamb chops) were rib chops, a bit tough, a bit fatty, but otherwise quite tasty. For these three items the bill was 10.5 Euros ($14), with no additional taxes or tip expected.

Bar Las Teresas, which was a stone's throw from my hotel, is another excellent tapas place with most items at about 2 Euros.

Jamon Iberico & Lomo Iberico

Spain is a great place to try Iberico ham, which is prohibitively expensive in the U.S. It's not cheap in Spain either, but you can buy a taste for a song. At Las Teresas I had lomo Iberico (cured pork loin) as well as the ham.

Champinones a la Parilla

I was a bit disappointed with the champinones a la parilla (grilled mushrooms) as they were white mushroom caps, perhaps my least favorite mushroom. For me the accompanying carrot salad was actually the highlight of the plate.

Pulpo a la Gallega

Pulpo a la Gallega (Galician-style octopus) is a dish you find all over Spain, in tapas bars and some more formal restaurants. It's cooked octopus in olive oil (sometimes warm, sometimes cold), topped with smoked paprika, one of the world's great spices. The version at Bar Las Teresas was respectable, though not extraordinary.

Stewed Swordfish in Tomato Sauce

But the pez espada guisado (stewed swordfish) was extraordinary. The fish was incredibly fresh-tasting and the tomato sauce had lots of character. The combination was perfect.

Bodega Santa Cruz (also known as Las Columnas) may well be the most popular tapas bar in Seville's Barrio Santa Cruz (where all the places I ate this time are located). Perhaps its popularity is due to the low prices, or perhaps it's that crowds of young people attract bigger crowds of young people. I went on a Saturday night and the crowd of mostly young people was spilling way into the street. I managed to find myself some bar space and ordered a number of items: tortilla Espanola (the national snack of potato omelette), boquerones fritos (fried anchovies), a montadito with carne mechada (a mini-sandwich with pot roast), and a fried shrimp dish (I forget the description) that had a heavy breading--similar to Chinese fantail shrimp or Vietnamese beignets de crevettes. Everything I had at Las Columnas was either too salty, too greasy, or both. I suspect all this stuff goes down just fine with heavy-drinking students, but I was very disappointed.

South African in Charlottesville

2010-12-21T17:30:00.000-05:00

Jeffersonia may have been my reason for visiting Charlottesville, but my visit also gave me the opportunity to dine with friends I hadn't seen in over 20 years. The choice of restaurant would have been a no-brainer nine months earlier, when Calvin Trillin wrote an encomium in the New Yorker to Sichuan chef Peter Chang, then running the kitchen at Taste of China. But Chang was no longer in Charlottesville, and my research failed to turn up any particular must-visit restaurant in town. So I chose The Shebeen, a South African restaurant with good press, figuring that at least I'd get to try something different. Happily, it was not only different, it was very good.

We started with the spicy peri-peri wings and a "Stellenbosch sampler," which displayed the Indian and Indonesian influence on the cuisine of the Cape region. It consisted of chicken satay, samosas and fried eggplant, served with banana ketchup.

My main course far exceeded my expectations. I ordered sosatie, described as "a delightful dish of cubed leg of lamb, skewered on sugar cane with dried apricots and marinated for at least twenty-four hours in mango chutney, tamarind & turmeric, grilled and served with samp and beans, yellow rice, mango chutney and a cucumber-mint yogurt." I was concerned that it might be too sweet, but there really was just a touch of sweetness to the meat, and the lamb was really excellent. Samp and beans, a typical Xhosa dish, is a cracked hominy and bean combo that reminded me of cachupa, the hominy and beans dish I had at Cesaria's, a Cape Verdean restaurant in Boston. The Shebeen was all out of rice that night (how's that possible?), so instead I substituted mealie pap: hominy grits with cheese. This humble starch, a staple of the Bantu diet, was absolutely delicious.

The Shebeen doubles as a sports bar, which is perhaps why, as a public service, they hang the day's sports page above the urinals in the men's room.

Vegetables Beat the Meat at Hyderabadi Kabab Joint

2010-12-15T11:55:00.000-05:00

The chicken kababs, fresh off the grill, a buck apiece at Deccan Kabab, a small Hyderabadi fast food joint in Jackson Heights, were spicy, tender and tasty, but the chopped beef kabab (Hyderabadi cuisine is, generally, Muslim rather than Hindu) was rather dry and quite rubbery.

The chicken biryani was respectable but not exceptional. The two vegetable dishes we ordered, though, were indeed exceptional, surprisingly so at a place whose name cries out "Meat!"

Bhagaray baingan is an eggplant dish with a peanut-tamarind sauce that is one of Hyderabad's great contributions to Indian vegetarian cooking. I had previously tried it at Sukhadia's, which makes a respectable and very rich version, but Deccan Kabab's take on the dish, which tasted like it included pickle spices, was superior.

Deccan's version of palak paneer was different than any I'd had before. The spinach was whole leaf rather than chopped, and the preparation (outside of the paneer, of course) did not include dairy (well, maybe some ghee; I'm not sure); I'm not partial to the creamed spinach approach to palak (or saag) paneer. The sauteed onions were a satisfying twist, and the spinach itself was darker than usual, with a deep, slightly charred flavor, as if the spinach had been somehow roasted before being sauteed.

Deccan Kabab
74-06 37th Rd. (near 74th Street)
Jackson Heights

Janie, the Perfect Stocking Stuffer

2010-12-12T16:07:00.004-05:00

If you've come here looking for leg, you're out of luck, because Janie isn't a she, it's an it. The Janie Dry Spot Cleaner, or simply the Janie stick, is as amazing as it is simple. It's simply a stick of dry, chalky clay with an accompanying brush, but it does wonders. It's the best thing I know of for lifting oil- or milk-based stains, and it's perfectly natural, with no chemical smell and nothing that can ruin your fabric. It's been around for decades, and it looks like they've never redesigned the packaging. You can find it at notions shops as well as some what-not shops, but it's also available online from a number of vendors, including Amazon. I buy mine at The Container Store.

Janie is simple to use. You rub some of the clay into the stained area of your clothing and let it sit a few minutes while the clay draws out the stain. Then you brush it off. Brushing will get most of the clay out, along with the stain, but any residue will come out with washing or dry cleaning. It works best when the stain is fairly fresh, but it also works remarkably well on older stains, including on clothes that have already been washed. It's like a folk remedy that's better and safer than the fruits of modern chemistry. It costs about $6, and it is indeed a perfect stocking stuffer.

A Wrong Number

2010-12-12T08:14:00.004-05:00

On Thursday night I got a call from my brother to inform me that my mother was in the emergency room awaiting admission to the hospital (nothing life-threatening, thankfully). He had received a call from one of my mother's friends in Florida, and he gave me the hospital's phone number that she had given him. I called the number the following afternoon, and I guess I wasn't listening closely to how the receptionist answered. I said, "I believe my mother was admitted there last night; can you check on that?" The woman replied, "Sir, this is an animal hospital! But I'm sorry to hear about your mother."

So I looked up the number of University Hospital, in Tamarac. The number was one digit away from that of the Sadowski Animal Hospital--721-2200 vs. 721-2100. How could that have happened? An animal hospital and a human hospital, and only a one-digit difference in the phone numbers. What are the odds? Does chance have a devilish sense of humor?

Cordoba

2010-12-08T14:10:00.000-05:00

Those of you who have followed the brouhaha over the construction of an Islamic center in lower Manhattan, erroneously referred to as the "Ground Zero Mosque" (and originally named Cordoba House, by the way), may find echoes of the current rhetoric in this account of the backlash over the proposed construction of a grand synagogue in Cordoba in the 13th Century:

"There is also proof of the construction of a great synagogue in the Jewish quarter, which provoked the criticism of both the council and a great part of the Christian population. Thus, in 1250, Pope Inocencio the Fourth issued a Bull in which the construction of this synagogue was described as a great scandal for the city. There is no confirmation of its opening or any documented evidence to back up the theory that it was located in what is now the small square of Maimonides. The ecclesiastical hierarchy and the majority of the population, having anti-Jewish attitudes, argued that the dimensions, height and architectural prominence of the synagogue should not be permitted."

Maimonides Statue

That quote comes from an exhibit at the Casa de Sefarad, a 14th Century Jewish house in Cordoba that now functions as a museum of Sephardic Jewry. My visit to Cordoba, a day trip from Seville, began in the Jewish quarter, the first historic section you pass through if you're coming from the train station.

Casa de Sefarad Courtyard

The museum was a fascinating surprise; I hadn't even known it existed until I stumbled upon it. One of the quirkiest artifacts was this LP cover from a collection of Jewish songs banned by the Inquisition:

The one ancient synagogue that does survive in Cordoba is a small ruin that served a number of purposes after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. The Moorish influence is quite apparent:

Cordoba's main tourist attraction is the Mezquita, the great mosque turned cathedral. It's an odd mix of Moorish architecture with later Catholic additions. The mosque had been built on the site of a former Christian church (a fact that raised the hateful nincompoop Newt Gingrich's hackles many centuries later), and it was converted to a cathedral after the Christian restoration.

I had a surprisingly excellent lunch at Bodegas Mezquita, right by the Mezquita itself. You wouldn't expect a place in the most coveted location for tourist traffic to have great food at reasonable prices, but a decal in the window from Guide Routard, the French backpacker's guidebook series that has been the source of solid recommendations in the past, gave me the courage to give it a try.

I ordered a 1/2 racion of surtido de Iberico, a platter of charcuterie from the prized acorn-chomping Iberico pig: ham, loin, and several kinds of chorizo and salami.

Patatas bravas (brave potatoes) is a common tapas bar item, spicy cubed fried spuds. The topping varies from place to place. Often it's mayo or aioli with smoked paprika mixed in, which I find disappointing. The best I've had was at the Las Bravas chain in Madrid, which has a secret sauce that they pump onto the potatoes. The version at Bodegas Mezquita was quite good, with a memorable, tangy sauce.

The meatballs (albondigas) with almond sauce I had was described on the menu as a Mozarabic dish; Mozarabs were Christians under Muslim rule who adopted certain aspects of Arabic culture and apparently made delicious meatballs.

How to Access and Donate to WikiLeaks

2010-12-05T13:17:00.004-05:00

For my readers who believe in freedom of information and freedom from government intimidation, I'm sharing this information, thanks to The Guardian.

To access Wikileaks, click on THIS LINK, which will redirect to whatever URL Wikileaks may have to move to.

The Guardian has also set up an INTERACTIVE DATABASE to the U.S. Embassies material and related reportage.

If you'd like to support Wikileaks financially, the recent ban by PayPal is hardly insurmountable. You have several options to donate at THIS PAGE.

A Fable

2010-12-05T12:58:00.001-05:00

From the latest issue of Mung Being, the Fables issue, The Rematch.

Avocado-Crabmeat Gazpacho Preempts Cuban Sandwich Egg Rolls

2010-12-02T19:30:00.000-05:00

I spent an afternoon in Salem this summer, en route from Rockport back to Boston, and lunched at Finz, a spacious, sunny waterfront seafood restaurant. I had decided on a lobster roll, which at $17 was about $7 bucks cheaper than the same thing in Manhattan. And I was planning to start with an appetizer that was quite tempting to a pig-happy guy like me, something I'd never seen before but immediately declared a brilliant idea, on paper at least: Cuban sandwich egg rolls. What's not to like? Pork shoulder, ham, Swiss cheese and pickles stuffed into an egg roll skin and deep fried. Not only that, if it looks like a Chinese egg roll it's practically kosher!

But I was waylaid. We asked what the soup of the day was and the waitress told us it was an avocado gazpacho topped with crabmeat. That sounded good too. An inner struggle ensued. Gazpacho or egg rolls? Egg rolls or gazpacho? A foodie more neurotic than I could have been crippled by indecision. But not me. "I'll have the gazpacho," I said, hoping I hadn't made a mistake I'd regret for all my living days.

I did not regret it. It was wonderful, the perfect summer soup. It was like a cross between a guacamole and a gazpacho, and the pristine white crabmeat was the jewel in the crown. The lobster roll was good, but an anticlimax.

I must return to Finz next summer. I can't stop wondering about those Cuban sandwich egg rolls.

Finz

Pickering Wharf

Salem, MA

More from Ronda

2010-11-26T12:20:00.002-05:00

Dinner last night, my second Thanksgiving meal, was tapas. I started at a fairly standard looking place, whose name I can't remember, where I had cured salmon and jamon serrano on toast. Then I moved on to Traga Tapas, the tapas outpost of the very high-end Tragabuches, perhaps Ronda's most expensive restaurant. Unlike most Spanish tapas bars, which have a well-worn, pedestrian look, Traga Tapas is sleek and trendy, as were its diners and its bartender. The offerings are somewhat inventive. I had a pintcho with sausage and onion and something called a stewed croquette (it was fried, but I guess the filling was stewed meat). The two most interesting items were the the asparagus pintcho which was topped with ethereal ribbons of sheep cheese and what I believe were apricot preserves and the chopped pork "sandwich," where the top layer looked like bread but was actually something like bechamel.

Today's lunch, at Almocabar, considered one of Ronda's best restaurants, was fabulous. I started with the stuffed squid with truffles, which was stuffed, it turns out, with the squid's legs. My main course was the picturesque and delicious duck leg with baked apple shown at the top.

During my morning ramble I saw this sign for a preschool.

Having eaten a fairly large lunch at late-for-me Spanish hours (at 2:15 I was the first diner), dinner (at 10PM) was just a quartet of pintchos at Casa Ortega: eel, chicharron (gimme some skin), salmon atop salmon salad, and the coveted jamon Iberico.

Ronda is home to Spain's first purpose-built bullring, built along the lines of a Roman arena. Ronda's importance in the history of bullfighting made Hemingway a fan of the town. Now they only stage bullfights on special occasions and it otherwise serves as a museum. I actually have no interest in the barbaric sport; I've never attended a bullfight, nor do intend to do so in the future. But it's an important part of Ronda's patrimony, and as a tourist I figured I should visit it. After all, though I'm also not a fan of genocide I've been to Dachau, Auschwitz and the Cambodian killing fields.

Happy Thanksgiving from Ronda

2010-11-25T13:15:00.001-05:00

I'm spending a long Thanksgiving weekend in Andalusia. I just arrived in Ronda this afternoon, by bus from Malaga, my airport of entry to the region. Along with Seville, Granada and Cordoba, Ronda is one of the most visited towns in Southern Spain, but most of the tourist traffic is day trippers from Costa del Sol resorts like Marbella (Michelle Obama was recently one of them). I'm staying two nights, one and a half days, before moving on to Seville, one of my favorite cities in the world. This is my first time in Ronda.

Ronda has plenty of charm, but its most striking aspect is its position atop two hills with an 18th-century "new bridge" joining the old and new(er) towns. From the Puente Nuevo, one has fabulous views of the hundred-meter-deep El Tajo Gorge. That and the winding, narrow streets of the old town make it an ideal spot for a wanderer like me.

Lunch today, just after arrival, between the bus station and my hotel, was at Pedro Romero, a noted restaurant near the bull ring. The restaurant is named for Pedro Romero Martinez, who is credited with the invention of modern bullfighting (right here in Ronda) in the 18th century. The food was decent enough, but I suspect I'd have done better if I hadn't gone for the cheapskate fixed menu at 15 Euros for 3 courses and a glass of house wine. The typical soup of Ronda, with eggs, ham, rice and bread was quite good, as was my dessert, a cinnamon custard. Main course choices were either grilled salmon or beef stew. Since I couldn't expect to be surprised by grilled salmon (and figured it's farmed), I decided to try the beef stew. And you know what? It was beef stew!

My hotel is a delight. The San Gabriel is a converted mansion (built in 1736) with charming public areas, pleasant rooms, and surprisingly reasonable prices (I'm paying 68 Euros a night for a single). My predecessors at the hotel include Isabella Rosselini, Robert Plant, John Lithgow, George Hamilton, and a number of Spanish celebrities. My predecessors at restaurant Pedro Romero include Orson Wells and Ernest Hemingway. Ronda is tiny, but it has plenty of names to drop.

More about Spain later. Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Pete and David Do the Founding Fathers (and Frozen Custard)

2010-11-21T12:04:00.001-05:00

First things first. Carl's Frozen Custard, in Fredericsburg (since 1947), is the perfect place to stop for a treat between Monticello and Mount Vernon. And custard it is, egg yolks and all, not some lily-livered soft-serve masquerading as custard. There are only three flavors, and you know what they are. I tried two, vanilla and chocolate, on a cone, for $1.89. The flavors were fresh and delicious. If you're a history tourist to this part of Virginia (be it American Revolution or Civil War), a stop at Carl's is de rigeur.

Less memorable was our lunch stop, at Allman's Bar-B-Q (since 1954), also in Fredericsburg. The atmosphere is great, a little roadside joint with a counter and a few tables, and "Mom" in the kitchen. But the pulled pork sandwich left much to be desired; it was dry, low on flavor, and without a trace of smokiness. The hush puppies were actually the highlight of the meal.

Monticello

I'd been wanting to visit Monticello for the longest time, but not being a driver my options were very limited. Surprisingly there's no public transportation from Charlottesville, and only a Gray Line tour from Washington. Several years ago I proposed a trip to Charlottesville to my friend David Mindich, whom I met, appropriately, in the doctoral program in American Studies at NYU. Our schedules finally meshed last weekend. We hooked up in D.C., where we had a fantastic dinner at Zaytinya, which assured its place as my favorite D.C. restaurant. The following morning we set out for Charlottesville, stopping for a serviceable southern buffet lunch at historic Michie Tavern.

I'll say little about Monticello, having nothing of value to add to the preponderance of information about Thomas Jefferson's home. If you want to know just about everything, you'd do well to read Jack McLaughlin's Jefferson and Monticello.

Mount Vernon

Our first and third Presidents both lived on Virginia plantations when they weren't living elsewhere. While Jefferson's Monticello is on a secluded hill, Washington's Mount Vernon is actually on the banks of the Potomac. Both homes were on land inherited from their respective families, but Jefferson built his house from scratch (twice), while Washington expanded the existing house. While Jefferson's ingenious innovations are a delight to the visitor to Monticello, I find the riverside location of Mount Vernon more hospitable.

In Charlottesville we also visited Jefferson's other architectural triumph, the University of Virginia.

Rotunda Skylight, University of Virginia

Though Edgar Allan Poe only spent a year at the University (he had to give Charlottesville wide berth after that, due to considerable debts), his room (appropriately, number 13) on Jefferson's original "Academical Village" is now maintained as a shrine of sorts where one can peek through the window.

Poe's Room, U. VA, with the Spirit of Mindich

New Southern and Nueva Peruana in San Francisco

2010-11-16T11:10:00.000-05:00

As I've written in recent posts, a good deal of my dining (and breakfasting and lunching) in San Francisco was devoted to historic venues I had somehow never gotten to before. But I also had several excellent meals at fairly new places. I learned about Limon, a restaurant that describes itself as Peruvian/Nuevo Latino fusion, from San Francisco Chronicle food critic Michael Bauer's Top 100 list. Considering the wealth of restaurants in the Bay Area (the list isn't limited to San Francisco), it's no easy feat to make the list. Limon is indeed deserving of its place on the list.

Don't expect a traditional Peruvian menu at Limon; the Nuevo Latino moniker (or "new world cuisine") is an apt description. While there's only a baker's handful of main courses (in other words, six), there are a large number of ceviches, tiraditos (sashimi-cut ceviche) and appetizers.

The two appetizers I shared were excellent. Costillas Nikkei (crispy spare ribs with a rocoto-soy sauce) were wonderful, moist as well as crispy with a rich porky flavor. Rocoto is a Peruvian hot pepper sauce, but the ribs weren't really spicy, more a spicy-sweet (but not cloying) mix. Also excellent was their spin on fried calamari, served with fried yuca and breaded green beans.

Despite the small number of main courses on offer, I had a hard time deciding, as all sounded quite tempting. I ended up going for the Chuleton Carlitos (pan roasted pork chop over cabbage-bacon hash and mushroom ragout). It was a wonderful play of flavors, with a strong, but not overwhelming, black pepper presence. Once again the pork sang to me, as did the sides.

* * *

It was the shrimp and grits on the menu that drew me to 1300 on Filmore, next to Yoshi's jazz club in the Fillmore district, which for many years was San Francisco's main black residential area and is now building on its history and refashioning itself as an entertainment district with an emphasis on black music. On the Friday night I went to 1300 the streets were abuzz with activity, a major change compared to just five years ago. 1300 on Fillmore is owned by Monetta White, whose family has roots in the neighborhood, and her husband, chef David Lawrence, a Brit of Jamaican ancestry with a background in French cuisine. The menu melds influences from French and California cuisine with classic dishes of the American South.

The shrimp and grits appetizer was a fairly faithful rendition of a classic Charleston shrimp and grits, reminiscent of the version at Charleston's Barbadoes Room, though not in the same league. Still, I'd say it was the best execution of the dish I've had outside the Low Country.

It was hard to settle on a main course, as all of the descriptions made me salivate like a Pavlovian canine. I decided I was in the mood for fish, so I ordered the black skillet roasted catfish with andouille dirty risotto and cornbread panzanella. I was not disappointed.

I'd say prices at both restaurants are moderate, or perhaps the high end of moderate.

San Franciscans are lucky, as I'd bet that per capita they have more good (and more diverse) restaurant choices than the residents of just about any other city in the U.S. I was lucky to have gotten to two of the better newish ones during my most recent visit.

Limon

524 Valencia Street

1300 0n Fillmore

Corner of Fillmore and Eddy

Cast Your Underwear to the Wind

2010-11-10T19:58:00.000-05:00

When is it time to throw away those old clothes? For some people it appears to be never, for others as soon as they're perceived to be out of style or too worn or damaged. My policy for a number of years has been to take my ready-to-be-discarded clothes on vacation, for one final wear. That way I can discard clothes along the way and return with a lighter suitcase or one filled with new things purchased while away.

Now when I think an article of clothing is on its last legs, I save it in a special travel drawer. Then, when I'm ready to pack, I take as many items as befit the weather at my intended destination.

Underwear is a no-brainer, and you can quote me on that. Let's say your briefs are getting a bit threadbare, or the waistband has lost some elasticity, or there's a hole or two. Save them for your next trip and after you've worn them one last time leave them in your hotel room's trash can.

I do the same with shirts and polos, and occasionally pants. I dumped a whole mess of old clothes in Korea and Cambodia this past winter.

While there are some travelers who like to be extra-fashionable while on vacation, my theory is that where nobody knows me it doesn't much matter what I wear. And it's so nice to have a lighter bag on the way back, or one filled with custom-tailored Madras shirts purchased in Chennai for a song.

My one exception to the rule is socks. I do a lot of walking, and good padded socks and comfortable, sturdy walking shoes are essential.

On my recent cross-country train trip I could have opened the window and literally cast my underwear to the wind. But, not wanting to sully the majestic American landscape with Cherchesian jockey shorts, I ended up doing so only figuratively.

Vintage S.F.: A Raw Bar, a Hofbrau and a Pancake that Thinks it's a Fish

2010-11-04T19:25:00.001-04:00

Two of the historic San Francisco eateries on my hit list were within a short walk of my historic hotel. I've walked by both on numerous occasions over the past thirty years, but somehow never managed to go inside either until the vintage restaurant project of my most recent visit.

I missed the Swan Oyster Depot in the past because it's always so crowded at lunchtime (and they don't do dinner). This time I went at 11:30 to beat the crowds. The restaurant has a counter with 20 stools (no tables), and even at that early hour all but two were taken.

The Swan (at 1517 Polk) opened in 1912, and has been under the current family ownership since 1946. It's a classic raw bar and a San Francisco institution. I ordered a bowl of their New England clam chowder and a half dozen oysters, a mix of Pacific and Atlantic varieties (kumamoto, miyagi and blue point). The chowder was excellent--simple and not thickened (a relief from the all-too-often gummy versions). The oysters are right-priced; I think the half dozen cost about $11. The oysters are served with a number of condiments and sauces, including a house mignonette.

Seated next to me at the counter was a woman who was drinking champagne and having a mini-feast. "Champagne at 11:30 on a weekday. Nice work if you can get it," I said. She told me she had just quit her job and was non-stop celebrating before embarking on months of overseas travel. I had originally planned on eating just the chowder and the oysters, but she had a plate of sliced fish that looked fabulous. I asked the counter guy what it was. He called it Sicilian-style sashimi; I might call it carpaccio. She had a combination of albacore, yellow tail and scallops; I substituted sardines for the scallops, wanting something richer in the mix. I'm so glad I ordered this, as it was the highlight of the meal. And at $10 for a healthy serving of sashimi-grade fish, served in olive oil with red onions and capers, it was a steal.

Tommy's Joynt (corner of Van Ness and Geary) has been around since 1947. It's a classic hofbrau, with a bar on one side, cafeteria-style food service on the other, and tables in-between. The cartoony facade is a familiar sight to San Franciscans, whether they've eaten there or not.

I thought about ordering their buffalo stew, a house specialty, but ended up going with a brisket sandwich (a particular weakness of mine) on a sour dough roll. It was served with a barbecue sauce on the side, but I thought it was better served by some spicy mustard. Though a tad too fatty, it was nonetheless quite tasty--a nice $6 sandwich. Tommy's reminded me of the Blarney Stones of New York.

May's Coffee Shop, in the Japantown shopping center, may not be a truly historic place, but it's been around for a while. Anyway, I went by early one morning to try their signature item, taiyaki, a sweet pancake in the shape of a fish. I had the traditional version, which is stuffed with red bean paste, but May's also makes chocolate and chocolate-banana versions.

A Sicilian Double-Header

2010-10-29T07:00:00.000-04:00

gelato on a brioche

We started at Joe's of Avenue U, in Gravesend, one of those old Brooklyn Italian neighborhoods that are now largely Asian and Russian neighborhoods. In fact, though they still serve traditional Sicilian specialties, I've heard that Joe's is actually owned by Russians.

We had a Sicilian starchfest: pasta con le sarde (bucatini with fresh sardines), rice balls, potato croquettes, seafood salad, and panelle (chickpea fritters). I used to eat this kind of food at La Focacceria in the East Village before proprietor Vinnie Bondi had the audacity to retire. Now Joe's is the best place I know of in the city for traditional Sicilian fare (though Ferdinando's, in Carroll Gardens has the better atmosphere, like an old Palermo joint).

panelle

After lunch we headed over to Bensonhurst, another old Brooklyn Italian neighborhood (Saturday Night Feversville) that is now largely Asian. Happily, Villabate, a Sicilian pasticceria/gelateria/cafe, is a survivor of the old guard.

Villabate has a wonderfully gaudy interior, with wonderfully gaudy cakes on display, miscellaneous tchotchkes and pictures of Jesus and his mishpoche. In addition to pastries, you can get nice Italian breads and snacks like sfingioni (pizzettes with bread crumbs, onions and anchovies).

But for me the draw is the amazing home-made gelato, among the best in New York. And this is one of the few places where you can get gelato on a brioche, which, believe it or not, is a popular breakfast in Sicily. When I was in Sicily I couldn't bring myself to have gelato first thing in the morning, but in Brooklyn gelato on a brioche makes a fine dessert. Interestingly, the Italians use the French spelling and pronunciation of brioche (Italian pronunciation would be something like brie-okay). These brioches are not shaped like the French ones, however, but rather like a hamburger bun, more appropriate for an ice cream sandwich. I find that the "lighter" flavors, like torrone, tiramisu, and especially cassata Siciliana (ricotta with dried fruit) work better on a brioche than any of the variants on chocolate. Gelato on a brioche is one of the world's great ice cream experiences, and you don't have to travel to Palermo to try it.

Alambres in the Garden of Eden

2010-10-23T17:00:00.001-04:00

There's a Mexican restaurant in Sunset Park called Gan Eden, Hebrew for Garden of Eden. I figured the previous occupant of the storefront must have been some kind of kosher restaurant, and that the Mexican restaurant just decided to keep the name. But my lunch companion, Dave Cook, asked the waitress about the curious name. "The owner's Jewish," she replied.

"Mexican or American?" I asked.

"Jewish," she replied.

"But from Mexico or the U.S.?" I asked.

"That's his daughter behind the register," she said. "I'll ask her."

The owner's daughter said, "He was born in Hawaii, but we grew up in Israel."

That explained the name, I guess, though not how a Jew from Hawaii and Israel ended up opening a Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn.

The thing that brought me to Gan Eden was the fact that I had seen alambres on the menu last time I was in the neighborhood. I'd been searching for this dish ever since I first had it in Mexico City a year ago. It's a griddle-cooked mix of meat (usually several choices), onions, peppers, bacon and white cheese. Alambres are served with tortillas for wrapping (see photo at top).

Apparently the word "alambre," which may be Arabic in origin, can refer to either skewered meat or the griddle-cooked dish shown above. The onions and peppers suggest that the griddled version my have evolved from the kebab. To further confuse matters, "alambre" means "wire" in Spanish. Whatever its origins, it's an addictive dish, and Gan Eden does it justice. They offer a choice of chicken, beef or mixed. We had the mix. In Mexico it's common for the meat to be al pastor (pinapple juice-marinated pork cooked on a rotating spit like shawarma), which itself was inspired by Middle Eastern cooking (pork notwithstanding).

Also quite good at Gan Eden were the chilaquiles with eggs. Chilaquiles is a popular Mexican breakfast dish, with fried tortillas (traditionally it's a way to salvage day-old tortillas), cheese, sour cream and spicy red or green sauce. It's often served with eggs and/or steak.

A plate of chicken, beef, bacon, cheese and vegetables, the quintessence of treyf, is the last thing I'd have expected to find in a restaurant called Gan Eden. I guess the moral is we all make our own Eden.

Gan Eden
4620 5th Avenue
Brooklyn
(718) 439-3399

Rotisserie Dogs

2010-10-23T08:45:00.001-04:00

I came across a fun bit of culinary trivia in the book Jefferson and Monticello, by Jack McLaughlin. In a discussion of cooking arrangements at Monticello, Mclaughlin writes (p. 231), "Before the invention of mechanical spit-turners, meat was often turned by a small 'turnspit dog.' The dog was trained to walk on a treadwheel which turned the spit."

Karnataka (in New Jersey and India)

2010-10-19T17:45:00.000-04:00

New Jersey

I first read about Hoysala, an Indian restaurant in Somerset, NJ specializing in the cuisine of the southern state of Karnataka, on a website called NJIndia. I'm guessing that all the restaurant reviews on the site are written by one very eccentric and opinionated guy, despite the use of the royal we. Most of the reviews are scathingly negative. One of the more recent pieces opens as follows: "All ye schmucks can say what you will but when it comes to dishing out the worst possible food, you just can’t beat these New Jersey shitholes masquerading as Indian restaurants. Completely clueless in the kitchen, utterly hopeless in the service department and totally remorseless in their overall attitude, most Indian restaurants in New Jersey are absolutely worthless pieces of shit unfit for even cattle."

So when I read a review of a restaurant that serves the well-nigh impossible to find cuisine of Karnataka titled "Manna from Heaven in New Jersey," I pricked up my eyes. Having found a great place on Long Island for the hard to find cuisine of Kerala, I was thrilled about the prospect of a place that serves the even more elusive cuisine of Karnataka.

Indian cuisine is incredibly diverse, which is why I'm always pissed off when ignorant yahoos respond to my recommendation of an Indian restaurant with comments like, "I don't like curry" (the Japanese restaurant ignorant yahoo response is "I don't eat raw fish"). The menu at Hoysala features quite a number of dishes I was completely unfamiliar with.

I hooked up with a bunch of friends and went out for a weekend lunch. For lunch they do a buffet, and I believe for dinner you have a choice of buffet or a la carte. The buffet featured quite a number of Karnatakan specialties, but I was disappointed that we couldn't order the pineapple gojju (pineapple and bell pepper cooked with onion, red chillies, menthe seeds and spices) that the NJIndia writer unabashedly kvelled about.

Still, there was an embarrassment of riches. The buffet included both vegetarian and meat dishes. There were a number of appetizers and salads, idlis, vadas, dosas and pappadums. Main courses included a revelatory egg masala, black pepper chicken, Malnad chicken and goat, spinach lentil thouve, alasande saaru (a black-eyed peas and potato dish), mixed vegetable saagu, Andhra chicken biryani, and shavige bhath (sort of a cross between idiappam and uppma (you can look 'em up)). For descriptions of the dishes, see the restaurant's menu. The food was, in general, moderately spicy, with a wide palette of flavors, and with but a few exceptions memorably delicious. The price for this cornucopia is $12.95.

India

I spent close to two weeks in the state of Karnataka on my third trip to India, in 1999, after I had wrapped up work on a Y2K IT project. The first two times in India I was on my own, but this time I had a travel companion, which made it financially feasible to hire a car and driver for 8 days. The sights of Karnataka are manifold, but scattered all over the state, and doing the itinerary by public transportation would have been rather rough and taken twice as long.

The restaurant Hoysala is named for the empire that ruled Karnataka from the 10th through 14th centuries. The stunning Hoysala temple architecture at Somnathpur, Belur and Halebid, built between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, are, as far as South Indian stone carving is concerned, rivaled in beauty and delicacy of execution only by the Chola architecture of Tamil Nadu.

My friend and I flew to Bangalore, the modern, high-tech center with a thriving English pub culture, and took the train to the delightfully charming but fast-growing city of Mysore. Mysore, the model for Malgudi, the setting for the novels of R.K. Narayan, is much more traditional in feel than Bangalore. Mysore is famous for its sandalwood and is home to a rather garish royal palace and great, rich coffee. In Mysore we hired our driver for our trip through Karnataka, ending in Hyderabad, in the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh.

The Jain pilgrimage site of Shravanabelagola, not far from Mysore, has the largest monolithic statue in the world, the 10th-century Bahubali monument. My friend Claudio, who I met in Karnataka in 1990, said that for an Italian Shravanabelagola is a funny name--it's like saying "Shravana beautiful throat."

After Shravanabelagola and the Hoysala sites at Belur and Halebid, we visited the fabulous ghost city of Hampi, the seat of the Vijayanagara empire from the 14th through 16th centuries, and then moved on to Badami, with its rock-cut Hindu and Jain cave temples.

Further north in the state we encountered Muslim architecture, like the 15th-century fort at Bidar; Bijapur, home to the Gol Gumbaz, a building that feature's a dome second only in size to that of St. Peter's in The Vatican; and Gulbarga, with a ruined fort that features a mosque modeled after the one in Cordoba, Spain.

Karnataka is one of the Indian states richest in attractions, yet due to the difficulty of travel and the greater fame of Northern sights, few travelers get beyond Bangalore and Mysore, which is a shame.

Karnataka Photo Gallery

And now, back to New Jersey for dessert...

Hoysala
2 JFK Boulevard
Somerset, NJ 08873
(732) 247-4300

Weekend in Rockport

2010-10-15T20:15:00.000-04:00

I was looking for an easy summer weekend getaway, to someplace I'd never been before, and I decided on Cape Ann, on the north shore of Massachusetts. I booked a whale-watching cruise out of Gloucester and had planned to stay in that town, at The Crow's Nest, rooms above the bar that figures prominently in the book and film The Perfect Storm. Then I watched the movie. Within minutes into the film there was a scene in the bar where the local fishermen are celebrating very loudly, so enthusiastically that the ceiling lamps were shaking. Hmm, rooms above the bar, I thought. I put the film on pause and called The Crow's Nest to cancel my reservation.

Instead I booked a room at a motel in nearby Rockport, and I was glad I did. Rockport is very compact, very walkable, and very charming. Gloucester is much larger, and is a largely working class town, more "real," for sure, than cutesy little Rockport, and also a place where a car would do one well.

I enjoyed wandering around Rockport, breathing the sea air and eating seafood. There was a torrential rain for a couple of hours my first afternoon, which I watched from the porch at my motel. After the rain the air was amazingly fresh and bracing, some of the best air I've ever had.

Just before the rain had started I went over to The Fish Shack for lunch, where I had a plate of the wonderfully sweet fried belly clams, a local specialty. I returned the following evening for dinner and had a spectacular 2-1/2 lb. lobster.

Helmut's Strudel, on Bearskin Neck, is a legendary local bakery-cafe, and their strudel is perfectly crispy, perfectly balanced. It being summer, I went for the cherry strudel. Bearskin Neck, which juts out into the ocean, has a dense concentration of shops and restaurants.

The Rockport Chamber Music Festival premiered its new concert hall this summer, a spectacular space with an ocean view as the backdrop. The concerts were sold out by the time I got there, but they did offer a tour of the hall.

I may have missed the chamber music festival, but I did catch some live music, a bit of Americana, a band concert in a gazebo just across the road from the beach.

The Oldest Italian Restaurant in America

2010-10-11T19:20:00.001-04:00

The current owner of Fior d'Italia and the waitress who served me were so nice that I wish I could say something nice about the food. Granted, I only went for brunch, and perhaps that's not the best barometer of a restaurant's quality. Still, the over-salted baked polenta I had was served with a tomato sauce that tasted like it came from a can, not a good sign for a "red sauce" Italian restaurant serving what the owner describes as Italian comfort food. And the Italian sausages were eminently forgettable too.

The restaurant claims to be the oldest Italian restaurant in America, and I have no reason to doubt the claim. They first opened in 1886 (the year both of my maternal grandparents were born) and have had a number of locations over the years, all in or around North Beach, San Francisco's Little Italy as well as ground zero for the beat poets (can one still use "ground zero" in a non-9/11 context?). They're currently at the San Remo Hotel, a charming European-style hotel with shared bathrooms that I stayed at a number of times in the 'eighties until I graduated to private bathrooms.

San Francisco has quite a few truly excellent Italian restaurants, so unless you're writing a blog series about vintage San Francisco eateries I'd recommend you eat at one of those others.

Cape Verdean in Boston

2010-10-07T20:30:00.002-04:00

cachupa

I spent an evening in Boston this summer before heading up to the north shore. With time for one dinner in town, I decided that I really wanted to try a cuisine that's unavailable in New York, Cape Verdean. Southern New England is the epicenter of the Portuguese-speaking diaspora in the U.S., especially around Cape Cod, New Bedford, Providence and eastern Connecticut (remember Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza?). Not only are there plenty of Portuguese and Brazilians in that neck of the coast, there are also immigrants from Portugal's former African colonies: Cape Verde, certainly, and I think, to some degree at least, Angola, Mozambique and Sao Tome e Principe. The islands of Cabo Verde, or Cape Verde, lie in the Atlantic about 350 miles off the west coast of Africa. They were uninhabited when discovered by the Portuguese, and most of the inhabitants now are creoles of mixed Portuguese and African ancestry. The country's most famous export is the singer Cesaria Evora, the barefoot diva.

I don't know if the restaurant Cesaria's, in Boston's Dorchester section, is named for its owner or in tribute to the singer. I also can't be sure it's still open, as the restaurant's website has been offline the last few times I checked. I do hope they're still in business, as the food was excellent, the prices low and the staff warm and cordial.

Cape Verdean cuisine draws largely from Portuguese cooking, with some African elements. The national dish is cachupa, a stew of beans and hominy with pork, sort of like a cassoulet, but also reminiscent of something one might find in the American south (like hoppin' John). Cesaria's cachupa was delicious, the flavors well-married by slow cooking. I can understand why this is the Cape Verdean comfort food.

We had started with two appetizers. The fried quail was wonderfully flavorful, with prominent but not overpowering notes of wine and garlic. The octopus was grilled to perfection with an enticing char.

fried quail

grilled octopus

Camarao Mocambique, or shrimp Mozambique-style, is a dish that has found its way into Portuguese as well as Cape Verdean cuisine by way of the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique. It's a spicy dish, seasoned with Malagueta peppers.

camarao Mocambique

Many of the dishes at Cesaria's can be found in Portuguese restaurants, but the quintessentially Cape Verdean cachupa is not to be missed.

Restaurante Cesaria

266 Bowdoin St.

Dorchester, MA

(617) 282-1998

Doin' the Tadich

2010-10-04T18:20:00.001-04:00

The Tadich Grill is undoubtedly California's oldest restaurant, having been established as a coffee stand in 1849 and later expanded to a full-service eatery. A visit to the Tadich was, of course, an essential stop on my historic restaurant itinerary. Before I left New York I called several friends. "Have you ever been to the Tadich Grill?" I asked.

"No, but I'd love to try it," was the response I got from several long-time Bay Area residents.

In response, I chided, "The restaurant's been around for over 150 years. You've been in the Bay Area for over thirty years. And it takes a visit from a New Yorker to finally get you there? Shame on you!"

I was joined by four shamed Bay Area residents.

I decided to go vintage all the way. I walked to California and Van Ness from the Majestic Hotel, the oldest in San Francisco, and hopped on the California Street cable car, which goes direct to the Tadich. This was only the second time I've taken a cable car, mostly a tourist attraction and at $5 more than twice the cost of a bus, but for my purposes this mode of transportation was de rigeur.

Before dinner I stopped off at another historic San Francisco locale, Schroeder's, just around the corner from the Tadich. This German restaurant and beer hall, the oldest on the west coast, opened in 1893 (though it's only been at its present location since 1959). They often have live polka bands, whether you like it or not.

I felt like a wuss ordering a short glass of bock beer when the standard glass in the joint is a 19-ounce "pint," liter mugs are not uncommon, and two-liter boots are available. But I didn't want to ruin my appetite for food or wine at the Tadich. Accordingly, I also skipped the complimentary happy hour meatballs.

The Tadich really is one of those classic old American restaurants, all done up in dark wood, waiters done up in white jackets. A good deal of the restaurant is taken up by counter/bar space, and I wonder if that's a remnant from a time when men of affairs were more likely to dine alone. At any rate, that aspect would make it a comfortable spot for solo diners today. Medium-size groups are seated at tables in semi-private partitioned quarters, another blast from the past, I guess, that you rarely find at restaurants that aren't Japanese or Korean.

As long as I was doing the tradition thing, I decided to go with several San Francisco classic dishes. I started with their house special salad, with crab meat and bay shrimp, topped with Louie dressing. Crab Louie is the classic San Francisco crab salad, served all over town, especially at Fisherman's Wharf. The dressing is a mayo-based cousin of Russian or Thousand Island, with a touch of chili.

Cioppino is another classic San Francisco specialty, an Italian-style fish stew reminiscent of a bouillabaisse. I had never tried the dish before, even though I've visited the city on countless occasions. While I have nothing to compare the Tadich version to, I enjoyed it greatly.

Another famous San Francisco eatery that had a life almost as long as the Tadich was Jack's, in the same downtown neighborhood. It had a 136-year run, ending in 2000. Shortly thereafter it became the S.F. outpost of Bistro Jeanty, a Wine Country favorite, as Jeanty at Jack's. I ate there several years ago in that incarnation (now gone too), and the well-preserved classic interior, full of little rooms, was a pure delight.

During my four days in San Francisco I ate at several other restaurants with long San Francisco histories, but I regret that I found out too late about several other important blasts from the past. Sam's Grill, also in the financial district, has been around since 1867. And John's Grill, opened in 1908, was a favorite haunt of Dashiell Hammett's and appears as a setting in The Maltese Falcon. It seems my dance card is already filling up for my next visit to San Francisco.

A Time to Give, a Time to Kvetch

2010-10-02T17:30:00.001-04:00

To everything there's a season, and early autumn is a time to start thinking about providing Thanksgiving meals to the hungry of our nation. As I've stated before, I believe those of us who revel in culinary joys should be especially mindful of the simple joy of a decent, balanced meal for someone who might otherwise go without. The organizations that provide meals to the needy are doing their Thanksgiving drives now, and you should consider helping them out.

Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest)
Food Bank for New York City
Citymeals-on-Wheels
Find a food bank in your town with the Food Bank Locator

Now for the kvetch. The other day I got my mail solicitation from Citymeals-on-Wheels, an organization that delivers meals to the homebound elderly of New York City. I was about to fill out the form and make a donation when I discovered that there was no place for credit card information. The form assumed one was sending a check. But how many people write checks any more? Almost every charity I give to has a form that includes space for credit card information. How could Citymeals have made such a stupid omission? I was about to give up, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Then I found another form online that had a section for credit cards. So what gives with the direct mail reply form? Don't they realize that any impediment is a potential loss of donations? I'd bet that by leaving the credit card section off the reply form they've easily lost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in support. And on top of that, the reply envelope was not postage-paid. Now I don't mind putting a stamp on, but what if I didn't have one handy? That might have been another reason for a contribution not made. What kind of idiots designed the solicitation campaign? Clearly the organization accepts credit cards, so why didn't the form say so? People who design mail solicitations should be as mindful of usability as web designers. Poor design = lost business or support. I needed to make my donation by mail, because I have to include a corporate matching gift form. I finally did so, but it was touch and go. If the folks from Citymeals-on-Wheels are reading this, wake up. And if they're not reading this, maybe they're reading the form I returned with my donation, upon which I scribbled: "Why no place for credit card info? You almost lost a donation. And you should supply postage-paid envelopes." But most likely a volunteer will see it and toss it in the trash before processing my check and my matching form. Let's see what I get next year.

My Favorite Thai Restaurant

2010-09-30T20:30:00.001-04:00

seafood with Thai herbs (pad cha talay)

soft shell crab with mango salad

duck larb

The first time I went to Chao Thai, last year, I was so blown away by their chicken larb, the best version of the dish I've had outside of Thailand, that I wrote a paean to the dish and the restaurant. Since then I've been back a number of times, and I'm never disappointed. Give me Chao Thai over the much larger and much more well known Sripraphai.

The menu seems to represent multiple regions, but the restaurant shines especially with its larbs and Esan (Northeastern) salads. Many of the best dishes are not on the regular menu, but on wall signs, some of them in Thai only. Ask your server for recommendations. That's how I first tried the pad cha talay, a mixed seafood stir-fry with a mind-bogglingly complex mix of Thai herbs. I've had other larbs there, catfish and duck, but as good as they were I'd still recommend the classic chicken version. This summer I had the excellent soft shell crab with mango salad several times. I'm also quite fond of the pork num tok, which is seasoned like a larb, but with sliced instead of minced meat. I think the only really disappointing dish I've had there was a pad kee mao (also known as "drunken noodles"), sauteed broad rice noodles with basil and chili. This was uninspired, a little too sweet, a little too greasy. Also note that if you ask for your dishes Thai spicy they'll take you seriously. For many diners medium-spicy will be mucho spicy enough.

Chao Thai is conveniently located near the Elmhurst Avenue subway (R & M trains). If you love Thai food and you live in the New York area, you really should give Chao Thai a try. And if you're tired of the crappy Thai restaurants that predominate in the U.S., you might find Chao Thai a revelation.

Chao Thai

85-03 Whitney Avenue (off Broadway)

Elmhurst, Queens, NY

Unusual Seasonings Chicken

2010-09-28T19:00:00.001-04:00

I first wrote about Spring World, in Chicago's Chinatown, in a post about Yunnan cuisine. The food was so good I knew I'd return when I returned to Chicago, and I did, and I did. The menu features both Yunnan and Sichuan dishes, and this intriguingly named item shows up on the Sichuan side. It really wasn't so unusual in taste at all, but it was wonderful. It's a cold dish with a mix of spices including Sichuan peppercorn, ginger and sesame seeds in what Sichuan menus often describe as a chili vinaigrette. This dish helped to confirm for me that Spring World is indeed one of the best Chinese restaurants in the U.S., with the added plus of the nearly impossible to find Yunnan dishes on the menu. Spring World is a particular favorite of Chicago Tribune food critic Kevin Pang, and he calls this dish his favorite appetizer in Chinatown.

I once asked a Chinese waiter if the dish called "amazing chicken" was really amazing. "Maybe not amazing," he said, "but really good." I'm glad I didn't ask the Spring World waitress if the seasonings in this chicken dish were really unusual, because if she had said no I might not have ordered it, and it would have been my loss.

Historic Restaurants of Chicago

2010-09-24T11:00:00.001-04:00

I don't think anybody would dispute the claim that The Berghoff is Chicago's most historic restaurant. This German beer hall opened in 1898, was granted Liquor License No. 1 after the repeal of prohibition in 1933, and served continuously until the family decided to close it in early 2006. It was reopened shortly thereafter by Carolyn Berghoff, the fourth-generation family member at the helm, who added diversity to the menu while retaining many of the Teutonic staples. Unfortunately, the restaurant has little to recommend it beyond history and beer. The food is best avoided. I had the jagerschnitzel (Pork cutlet, sautéed with mushrooms, bacon and Jagermeister infused sauce, flanked on either side with caramelized root vegetables and spaetzles), which wasn't too bad, but the root vegetables were awful and the spaetzle was a veritable salt mine.

My dining partner, the wacky conceptual artist and poet Bradley Lastname, was seriously disappointed by his pappardelle ai funghi. An even greater dissapointment was the limp and cloying apple strudel. Even though the place was almost empty on a Friday night at 8:45 it took an eternity for somebody to seat us and the service, by bored automatons, was no better than the food. Granted The Loop is pretty dead in the evening, but you'd think a Chicago institution would have some business. I have to assume they fare better at lunch, unless everybody has figured out by now that the food sucks.

If not for my beer flight, 4- or 5-ounce servings of five different house brews, I'd have nothing nice to say about The Berghoff, which is clearly coasting on name recognition.

Lou Mitchell's, a classic lunch counter, coffee shop, diner, what have you, is on the National Register of Historic Places in its Route 66 section. There are always long waits, made easier by the complimentary donut holes and Milk Duds passed out to the hungry, queued multitudes. Actually, if you don't want to wait for a table, especially if you're solo, you can get a spot at the counter pretty quickly. I had planned to have my last breakfast in Chicago there, as it's a stone's throw from Union Station, but, alas, they were closed for Labor Day. But I did eat there some years ago and had an excellent mess of scrambled eggs and sausages and hash browns, served up in a skillet.

Army and Lou's, a soul food restaurant on the South Side, opened in 1945 and is one of the oldest black-owned restaurants in the midwest. It was one of Mayor Harold Washington's favorite spots. I went with pianist extraordinaire Billy Foster, who drove up from his home in Gary, Indiana to join me at the Chicago Jazz Festival that day. I always enjoy Billy's company, but I also appreciated the ride, as it saved me an hour-long bus ride. I had no idea Chicago was so long from north to south until I checked the CTA trip planner. It was 9 miles from my hotel on East Wacker down to 75th Street, and there's lots more Chicago north of Wacker.

My smothered pork chops, for a whopping $10.95, came with a delicious oxtail soup and a choice of one side. I figured ordering mac and cheese on top of smothered pork chops would be coronary overkill, so I went for the healthy choice, creamy cole slaw. Everything was delicious except the mediocre rolls and dry corn bread.

So, I smothered my arteries. So what?

If you're visiting Chicago I highly recommend a meal at Army and Lou's. It's worth the trek.

And definitely skip The Berghoff. Or stop in for a quick beer and eat elsewhere.

The Great American Canelé

2010-09-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

Ever since I first tasted one at the Dijon Foire Gastronomique in 2005 I've been a fan of the canelé (also spelled with a double n), a classic Bordelais pastry. It looks like a tiny bundt cake, but it's a thing altogether different. A canelé has a crunchy, caramelized outer crust and a fluffy interior that's sort of a cross between a cake and a custard. At the top it has somewhat the consistency of a French cruller, and further down it morphs into a moist custard. The play of textures makes for a wonderfully sensual experience. The classic version is flavored with rum and vanilla. My favorite rendition in New York can be found at the Petrossian Cafe, but without a doubt the best I've had in the U.S. are available at the La Boulange bakery and cafe chain in the Bay Area, where the photo above was shot.

Traveling the Old-Fashioned Way

2010-09-18T09:45:00.001-04:00

As John Houseman would say, I earned it.

Literally. I used Amtrak points to book a sleeper on the California Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco. This is one of America's greatest scenic train rides, with hours of spectacular vistas in daylight through the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. If I had paid for the trip it would have cost nearly $1500. My bedroom featured a sofa that turns into a bed at night, a comfortable chair and a private toilet/shower combo stall. Also included with my ticket were all meals, so my only expenses for the two-days-plus ride were tips and alcohol. And the steak at dinner was surprisingly good.

The bedroom, on the upper level, had fine views out the window, but I spent much of the day in the Vistadome panoramic lounge car, admiring the scenery and talking with other travelers. For the first day and a half there was a group of Amish folk from Goshen, Indiana. The Amish may eschew modernity, but they love to laugh. They were off to a resort in Colorado.

I spent a lot of time talking to Cliff, a San Franciscan returning home from a family visit. He's working on a midlife career change, studying Chinese medicine, and at one point, after he had gotten to know me and felt comfortable enough, I guess, he asked if he could take my pulse. With his fingers on my wrist he proclaimed, "Your appetite is healthy!"

"All of my appetites are healthy," I replied.

Whether he really gauged this from my pulse or whether it had something to do with the fact that I'd been talking about food for two days, I'll never know.

The biggest surprise of all was that the train, which is perennially late, arrived at the terminus in Emeryville, California five minutes early.

A serendipitous addition to the old-fashioned travel theme was the deal I found on hotels.com. For $60 a night I scored a room at the Hotel Majestic, San Francisco's oldest continuously operating hotel. It has that distinction by virtue of its location at the corner of Sutter and Gough. Gough is two blocks west of Van Ness, which was the line of demarcation for the seismic and fire devastation of the 1906 earthquake.

Sometimes a grand hotel of the past can be a fleabag of the present, so I wondered whether I'd be in for an unpleasant surprise. Happily, I got the most pleasant of surprises: a charming hotel in a non-touristy but still convenient neighborhood with a clean, cozy room furnished in Victoriana.

The bathroom even had a clawfoot tub, which for some reason I keep thinking of as a clubfoot tub.

My hotel in Chicago, the Club Quarters, at 75 East Wacker, is not a historic hotel, but it is in a historic building, the Mather Tower, a designated landmark.

The leisurely cross-country train trip and the historic hotel stay inspired me to do much of my dining on a theme, seeking out the most historic restaurants in Chicago and San Francisco. Reports on those will follow shortly.

Farewell, Old Voting Booth

2010-09-15T10:30:00.005-04:00

I voted last night, not without a touch of sadness. Sadness not for anything to do with politics per se, though there's plenty of that sort of sadness to go around, but rather nostalgia for a bygone era, sadness for the demise of the old New York voting machine, the voting machine I had cast every prior vote on, having always been a New York City resident.

For me, that machine was a fitting symbol of our democracy and of our place in the body politic. Even for an atheist like me there was an appeal to the almost sacred and most assuredly ritualistic nature of those old machines. For me those machines and voting went hand-in-hand. There was something majestic about the big red handle you'd pull to the right to close the curtains. And then you were inside a zone of privacy, almost like a confessional, where you would exercise your sacred duty of citizenship. Flip the little black levers down for your candidates of choice. Then, after all of your choices were made, pull the big red handle back to the left to register your votes and open the curtains.

That was the kind of voting machine my mother took me into by the hand as a tyke, to watch her exercise her civic duty, perhaps when I was four, when she voted for JFK. My first time in the booth as a voter was 1974, the year of a gubernatorial race, when Hugh Carey was the victor. I probably voted Socialist Workers that year. I know I voted for the Socialist Workers' candidate, Peter Camejo, not Carter, in 1976, my first presidential election. Over the years I've rarely missed a general election, and hardly any primaries either.

Marking an ephemeral paper ballot last night I truly felt a great sense of loss. And, I suppose, of advancing age.

Frushi and Pancake Flights in Chicago

2010-09-11T12:51:00.006-04:00

Orange ("Contemporary Brunch with a Peel") is a mini-chain of brunch-only restaurants in Chicago, serving 7 days a week in the mornings and afternoons. One of the first things that caught my eye when I checked their website was their pancake flights, a weekly themed selection of four kinds of pancake inspired by the wine flight. Unfortunately, when I ate there last Sunday the theme was chocolate bars. I'm sure that would a-peel to many, but I'm not a big chocolate fan, especially in the morning, and besides, chocolate happens to be a Prilosec-resistant gastric bete noire for me. So instead I chose the orange-rosemary French toast. It was OK, but something was missing--I suspect not enough salt in the bread or eggs; perhaps a bit more orange tartness in the mix would have saved the day.

Much better were the delicious chicken apple sausages.

But what really impressed me was their signature "frushi" (they've trademarked the name), which is, as the name suggests, fruit sushi. I think it's a brilliant, fun concept, and quite reasonably priced. $2.50 will get you an order of two pieces of the week with fruit garnish, and each additional order is $1.50. Last Sunday they featured strawberry with coconut rice and grapefruit atop what I think was a pineapple juice-infused rice.

The French toast misstep notwithstanding, I really liked Orange, and plan to return next time I'm in Chicago. I appreciate a restaurant with inspired whimsy. Did I say whimsy?

Thelma Todd : Oh, Professor, you’re full of whimsy.
Groucho : Can you notice it from there? I’m always that way after I eat radishes.

My Cleansing Diet

2010-09-04T11:04:00.002-04:00

You wanna hear about my cleansing diet? I'll tell you about my cleansing diet. I eat whatever the fuck I want, then I shit it out.

For some reason, among all the quackery and faddishness in the health world, the mania for cleansing diets and the bogus premises behind them really stick in my craw. Maybe I need a craw cleanse.

Really it all boils down to squeamishness and the ability of snake oil salesmen to capitalize on it. People who live in terror of the natural messiness of life want to believe that they can clean everything up with a magic bullet. But most sane medical practitioners tend to agree that not only are cleansing diets potentially dangerous, they're probably useless too (see this article from Web MD). Anyway, there's a great system for cleansing the human body, and it's the human body itself, a generally efficient, integrated system for processing nutrients and disposing of waste.

I don't even want to think about what cleansing diet proponents must be like in bed.

Steak-Nose

2010-08-09T10:13:00.001-04:00

My story "The Man with a Steak Nose" appears in the latest Mung Being.

Otherwise, I'm still on vacation.

Word of Mouth Is Taking a Summer Vacation

2010-07-04T17:06:00.000-04:00

See you in September.

The Kidney

2010-07-04T17:04:00.000-04:00

When I was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College I used to hang out at a bar called The Jolly Bull Pub. The other regulars included a classmate of mine, a fellow English major, and a toothless old hag barfly. My friend would always flirt with the hag, as a joke, but one night he and the hag were both real drunk, and she ended up going home with him. And even more surprising, it wasn't just a one-night stand–it turned into a hot and heavy affair. This guy had fallen madly in love with the hag, head over heels. They became inseparable. Until she went into the hospital, that is. It turns out she needed an operation, a kidney transplant, and my friend had agreed to be the donor.

The operation was a success, and my friend visited the hag in her hospital room every day. Until one day, when she told him not to return, that she didn't want to see him any more. It was over, she said, she had been leading him on all along, she only wanted him for his kidney. Well, my friend was crushed when he heard this, and he just lost it, completely. He started drinking more and more and stopped going to classes. He’d sit at the Jolly Bull all day, cadging drinks from the other customers. He hardly ever spoke. And when he did speak, it was only to ask for another drink–except, every once in a while he’d begin to chant a single word, over and over and over, like a mantra."Kidney. Kidney. Kidney..."

My Husband Forced Me to Have Sex with Our Parakeet

2010-06-26T17:25:00.001-04:00

Nothing to say about food this week, so I thought I'd scrape the bottom of the barrel.

This is a real oldie. I wrote this in the summer of 1977, when I was 21. I remember the circumstances precisely. I was on the ferry from Bar Harbor to Nova Scotia and I saw a newsstand full of True Confessions-type magazines. After taking note of a number of the article titles I got the inspiration for my own True Confessions-type poem. I sat down at a table in the snack bar and knocked it out in one take. I'm pretty sure it was never published anywhere, but I used to perform it with Sonorexia, to a twangy country guitar accompaniment by Elliott Sharp. I've been able to recall this from memory.

My Husband Forced Me To Have Sex With Our Parakeet

My husband forced me to have sex with our parakeet
Last Friday night.

It was gettin' late,
He'd been drinkin' beer all night,
And he says to me,
"Honey, I want you to fuck the parakeet."

And I says to him,
"Please, Bobby, don't make me do it."
And he says,
"You're gonna do it!"

So we did it:
Me and the parakeet,
While Bobby stood by and watched.

I didn't like it very much,
And the bird was hurtin' me a lot,
And I was feelin' real bad,
Until the parakeet says to me:
"Honey, I love ya."

Just like Bobby used to.

Maima's in the Kitchen

2010-06-20T16:15:00.001-04:00

okra stew

Queens is indisputably the top borough when it comes to ethnic food options, but one does not normally think of Jamaica as a foodie destination neighborhood. But when I learned that Jamaica was home to a Liberian restaurant a visit seemed most definitely in order. So, on a recent Friday afternoon I took the E train to the end of the line and hooked up with fellow blogger Dave Cook for an early dinner at Maima's.

I know very little about Liberia. I know that the country was founded as a back-to-Africa movement for freed slaves. I know that many Liberians have English-sounding names, like Charles Taylor. I know that Liberia has had a troubled history of corrupt leaders, like Charles Taylor. I know that the capital, Monrovia, is named for James, not Earl. And I recently learned that while Liberian cooking has much overlap with other West African cuisines there's a particular fondness for hot spice in Liberia.

I was expecting a simple, hole-in-the-wall, but Maima's is cozy and tastefully decorated, giving it a very comfortable atmosphere. Maima, very much the matriarch, took our order, cooked our food and served it. When two food bloggers get together for a meal it's inevitable that too much food would be ordered. Though some dishes were listed as appetizers and some as main courses, the distinction is not particularly relevant, and you'll likely be served everything together.

We ordered the two stews of the day, okra and the artery-clogging palm butter, served with white rice. Both were cooked with a combination of crab (which seems to be a major ingredient in Liberian cooking), chicken and shrimp. An incendiary hot sauce was served on the side. The okra was cooked in a way that broke it down and mitigated some of the vegetable's mucilaginous (Dave's chosen word) consistency. The palm butter was scary rich, and is probably best shared among four or more.

palm butter

pepper shrimp

The pepper shimp was fiery and delicious: fresh shrimp in the shell with a red pepper coating that was reminiscent of similar dishes from Sri Lanka and South India, only this was hotter. Our fried plantains were delightfully soft, hot, sweet and gooey. The homemade lemonade was way too sweet for my taste, and I was disappointed that the fresh ginger beer was not ready.

Unless you live nearby it's a trek, to be sure. But it's not far from JFK airport, so you might want to consider combining an international flight with a Liberian dinner some day.

Maima's
106-47 Guy R. Brewer Blvd.
Jamaica, Queens

(trivia: Guy R. Brewer Blvd. is named for the state assemblyman who was instrumental in developing Jamaica as a "suburban" black neighborhood in the 1940s)

The Quesadilla That Ate Pete

2010-06-14T10:58:00.000-04:00

I must have passed this Mexican grocery in Sunset Park hundreds of times. It's on Fifth Avenue, just north of the park, so I pass it whether I'm headed further down Fifth for Mexican food or crossing through the park over to Eighth for Asian food. I've always been interested in their quesadillas, Puebla-style, with either flor de calabaza (zucchini flower), champinones (mushrooms), or huitlacoche (corn fungus). I once walked into the place, but there didn't appear to be any place to sit down, so I moved on and ate elsewhere. This weekend I decided I'd pick one up and eat it in the park as a snack, then head over to Eighth Avenue for some Vietnamese or Malaysian food. So I went inside and asked the guy at the deli counter in the back if this was where I order quesadillas. He pointed to a doorway in back of him. Lo and behold, there was a secret little restaurant in back, with a few tables, counter space, and a mini kitchen. I love discovering hidden places like that. I asked the cook whether he had flor de calabaza quesadillas. "No," he said, "huitlacoche." So I ordered one huitlacoche, my intended pre-lunch snack.

When it arrived at my little table I was overwhelmed by its magnitude. I wasn't expecting such a monster, never having tried Puebla-style quesadillas before. It was made with giant corn tortillas and cut into three pieces. Inside was huitlacoche, corn kernels, green chiles, and the fresh white cheese that's similar to mozzarella. Guacamole was served on the side.

I could barely finish two-thirds of it. Needless to say, I scrapped my plans for lunch part two.

I don't know if the place has a name beyond Deli Grocery. It's at 4011 Fifth Avenue, between 40th & 41st Streets.

The Bumsteads and Me

2010-06-09T15:38:00.000-04:00

My latest piece in Mung Being was thirty years in the making. I think the first version was written in 1980. It was a brief, mannered piece, an homage to Walter Abish, a writer I was very fond of at the time. The piece came out of an informal writers workshop that as far as I can remember lasted for one meeting (or maybe it outlasted me). It was held at the apartment of Barry Marx, and also included Linda Svendsen, Bonnie ZoBell and Judy Lopatin (all alumni of the Columbia graduate writing program). As an assignment, Barry had presented us with a panel from a Blondie comic strip without any words. We were to use this as the basis for a story.

A few years later I decided to rewrite the piece, to flesh it out. Over the years I sent it out here and there to no avail, tinkering with it every time. I hadn't thought about it much lately until Mung Being's editor Mark Givens announced the upcoming Confidence Games issue. I thought this might fit, and I fiddled with it some more. Now the fiddler has fled and the story is etched in pixels.

Read "At Dagwood and Blondie's"

Eating Like A Pig

2010-06-04T15:47:00.001-04:00

For some people the purpose of a diet is to lose weight and keep it off. For me the purpose is to reset my body weight for further pigging out. So, starting last Friday I made up for lost time.

I left work early for the holiday weekend and headed over to Mile End, in Brooklyn, for a Montreal-style smoked meat sandwich. This was my third time there. When I wrote about it after my first visit I kvelled about the smoked meat, with minor reservations: sliced too thick and a tad too much black pepper. The second time I chatted with the owner and told him that I had written that review. He had seen it and agreed I'd made some good points. He said that they're always tinkering with the recipe, and that during weekdays, when they're less busy, they have the luxury to slice the meat thinner (it's hand-sliced). The second time around the pepper balance was much better and the slices perfectly thin and even. The third time was a disappointment, however. While still quite good, the slices were thick again, and the meat was much more heavily smoked--it tasted like a cross between Texas brisket and Montreal smoked meat. The owner had told me that the smoked meat was different every time, and he wasn't kidding.

Afterwards, as I detoured to Court Street for a walk through Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens before crossing the mighty Gowanus back toward Park Slope, I stopped off at the Court Pastry Shop, an excellent Italian bakery, and had a piece of their wonderful grain pie, a Neapolitan Easter pastry made with ricotta and dried orange.

I had a light dinner.

The next day I took a walk to Sunset Park and broke my noodle fast at Nyonya with a plate of chow kuey teow, a great Chinese-Malaysian rice noodle dish. For dinner I had a mortadella sandwich. I love mortadella, and I love how it's proud to show its fat.

I took another walk to Sunset Park on Sunday and stopped at Tacos Matamoros, my favorite Mexican restaurant in the neighborhood. I had two tacos grandes, which are served with excellent guacamole--one lengua (tongue) and one al pastor (Mexican pineapple-marinated pork shawarma). Matamoros makes the best al pastor I've had in New York. I also tried their seafood ceviche tostada for the first time, and that was also quite good.

Back in Sunset Park on Memorial Day I went to Pho Thanh Hoai III, my favorite Brooklyn Vietnamese, where I had an order of spring rolls and bun rieu cua, a crabmeat noodle soup. Afterwards I had a delightfully flaky almond egg custard tart from Egg Custard King, on the next block.

Dinner stops during the week included Chao Thai, in Elmhurst and Cuba, in the Village. I'm always blown away by Chao Thai. Cuba, on the other hand, didn't do much for me at all.

And an hour ago I had a gelato, downstairs from my office at Melt. It's either a blessing or a curse to have a good gelateria so close to the office. Their flavors can be hit or miss, subject to individual tastes, but today they had one of my favorites, and one I've never seen elsewhere: mascarpone caramel pistachio.

I'm working up to another diet. I fear it may be sooner rather than later.

An End of Diet Dream

2010-05-29T09:24:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I came off a 4-week diet. Since the beginning of the month I'd been on my usual periodic modified eating plan: a bowl of cereal in the morning (my main source of complex carbohydrates), all the fruit I want, lean meat and seafood (mostly grilled), salads. I avoid most starches (no bread, rice or pasta), fried foods, and desserts. I keep it interesting by finding appropriate dishes I like at the types of restaurants that tend to use lighter cooking styles: Middle Eastern (e.g., chicken kebabs), Japanese (grilled fish, sashimi, hijiki), Thai (larb, squid salad), Vietnamese (hot and sour fish soup, shrimp salad). For a mid-afternoon snack (especially since I eat lighter lunches) I'll often have a Kashi TLC bar; they're satisfying, calorie-efficient, and help curb cravings for more dangerous sweets.

Anyway, Thursday was my last diet day, and I'd had a Thai seafood salad for dinner. In the middle of the night I had a dream.

It was still Thursday evening and I had a powerful desire to break my diet. I tried to reason with myself that it was the final day, and the next day I could have anything I wanted. Keeping to my decided-upon diet dates is a point of honor with me. But in the dream the devil got me. I desperately wanted something fried and starchy. So I started wandering around looking for a restaurant. Though I was going to break my own rules, my conscience nonetheless kept me away from really bad stuff, like fried chicken. I finally decided on a South Indian restaurant. I walked in and looked at the menu. I'd already had dinner, albeit a light one, and I decided that an appetizer should be enough to satisfy my craving.

I ordered medhu vada, a fried snack often described as "lentil donuts." Almost immediately, the waiter brought the plate of vada, but he didn't bring any condiments. South Indian snacks are ususally served with coconut chutney and sambar. Then two filthy little ragamuffins appeared at my table, one carrying sambar and one with coconut chutney. The kid with the chutney was Indian, but the one with the sambar was blond and blue-eyed. After they placed the condiments in front of me they both held out the palms of their hands, clearly asking for money. I knew from traveling in India that saying "no" or "go away" to street urchins has no effect. But I also learned that a shooing-away gesture works like a charm, and it did this time too.

As I was about to dig into my snack, I saw two other children, both Indian, both perfectly neat and clean, and dressed in black waiter jackets. One boy said to the other, regarding what had just transpired at my table, "What were they doing?"

"Asking for baksheesh, of course," the other said.

"I could never do that," the first boy replied.

Elliott Sharp, The Movie

2010-05-27T20:17:00.003-04:00

It's been a while since I've seen my old friend and past collaborator Elliott Sharp, so I've only just become aware of a documentary film about him that was completed a couple of summers ago. Here's the trailer from Elliott Sharp: Doing the don't.

South Florida Redeemed Again, This Time by Dinner

2010-05-23T13:00:00.000-04:00

A while back I wrote about how a brunch at The Blue Moon Fish Company, in Coral Springs, Florida, rescued me from the culinary wasteland that is South Florida. Of course, I don't go to South Florida in search of great food, but if I'm going to visit my mother I always hope there's someplace decent we can go to. On my most recent visit we decided to try Blue Moon again, this time for dinner.

It was a Sunday night and we lucked out pricewise because they've just introduced a three-course dinner special (every night except Saturday), and you don't even have to be an early-bird. Blue Moon is a relatively upscale restaurant for the area, with most entrees in the $20-30 range. For the dinner special they offer a generous subset of the menu with a varied choice of appetizers and desserts free on top of the entree price.

I started with the tuna poki, marinated sashimi tuna served in a martini glass, accompanied by sushi rice and julienned vegetables. My main course was a really nice, plump piece of sweet-potato crusted corvina (Pacific sea bass, popular in Latin America--I had corvina in Peru), served with spinach, basmati rice and a Grand Marnier butter ($22 for the three-courses; my mother's rib eye was $28). The only misstep was a Jamaican rum and coconut creme brulee that wasn't a creme at all, but rather a runny liquid. Clearly something had gone wrong in the kitchen, since they served a perfectly decent creme brulee at brunch.

Blue Moon Fish Co.
10317 Royal Palm Boulevard
Coral Springs, Florida 33065
(954) 755-0002

Dinner for One Please, James

2010-05-16T08:38:00.000-04:00

If you're a lonely, friendless wretch like me you often find yourself dining alone in restaurants. And if you like variety in a meal, that puts you at a decided disadvantage, especially if you prefer Asian food, best eaten family-style. So what's a miserable wretch to do? There are buffets of course, but outside of a few Indian lunch buffets most are subpar. For me, Asian combination rice plates represent one solution. At Malaysian restaurants there's nasi lemak, a plate consisting of coconut rice, chicken curry, dried tiny fish (ikan bilis), achat (pickled vegetables), hard boiled egg, peanuts and cucumber. And at Indonesian restaurants there's nasi rames or nasi campur. I'm not sure what the difference, if any, between the two terms is. Nasi campur literally means "mixed rice." The Padang-style restaurants in Queens usually have nasi rames on their menu. At Mie Jakarta, which I guess is Javanese-style, they serve nasi campur, and oh boy is it good.

Though Mie means noodles, I've yet to try any of the noodle dishes at Mie Jakarta, but I've had the nasi campur twice. It's an amazingly good meal for $6.50 (more with whole fish). You get your choice of main course from a list of about six, and then you get everything else: a mild but fabulously flavorful vegetable coconut curry (with kale, jackfruit and bamboo shoots), fried tempeh with a chiplike crispness, cucumbers, excellent shrimp chips (kroepoek), and a hard-boiled egg covered in the sauce of your main course. The first time around I had the ayam goreng rica, fried chicken with topped with a red chile sambal (very similar to the ayam balado served at Padang restaurants). I got a delicious plump, moist breast with a wickedly spicy chile paste. The next time I got the nasi campur rendang (shown above). Daging rendang (dry curry beef) is served in Malaysian as well as Indonesian restaurants. Most of the Indonesian versions I've had are truly a dry curry: sold by the piece, the beef, somewhere between stewed meat and jerky in consistency, is coated with a mix of curry spices, but there's no sauce to speak of. I usually prefer the Malaysian version, which is chunks of beef in a thick, spicy coconut-based curry sauce. Well, the rendang at Mie Jakarta is closer to what I know from Malaysian restaurants than Indonesian ones, but it's possibly the best I've had. There's a wonderful complexity to the spice mix, and the sauce has a consistency not unlike a Mexican mole.

A plate like this can almost make a man glad to be alone.

(Don't ask me what that photo accompanying the song is all about.)

Mie Jakarta
86-20 Whitney Avenue
Elmhurst

The Barry Marx Toupee Story

2010-05-09T09:30:00.001-04:00

Barry Marx has been gone for about thirteen years now. He died at 41, way too young, in the middle of a phone call, of a freak heart attack due to a congenital defect he never knew he had. He was in L.A., living his dream, writing for television, something he had wanted to do for years.

I met Barry in 1978 when we were both students in the graduate creative writing program at Columbia, but I left after a year due to the stifling conservatism of the place. Barry was one of a handful of friends I retained from that year. We were both in the fiction writing program, but Barry's real aspiration was to write for film or television. He got his wish in 1996 or '97. For a few years prior to that he had been writing scripts for a video game company. It was when he worked as writer/producer of "Smoke and Mirrors," a Penn and Teller game, that he became buddies with Penn Jillette. I believe it was Penn who got him the gig writing for "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch." Penn also delivered the eulogy at Barry's funeral.

Barry went to movies all the time, a lot more than I did, and when I saw him it was often to catch a film. This particular incident happened in the mid-eighties, but I can't remember what film we saw that day. We had gotten to the theater at least ten or fifteen minutes early and were chatting. At one point I told him about a guy I had seen earlier that day who had the most dreadful toupee. It was precariously perched atop his head, and though it was probably meant to be dirty blonde it was so dirty it was practically snot green.

"All toupees are lousy," Barry said. "There's no such thing as a good toupee. They all look phony."

"How can you be sure?" I asked. "A good toupee wouldn't look like a toupee, so you'd never notice it."

"No way," he said. "I'm sure there's no such thing as a good toupee."

We split hairs about toupees a little while longer and then moved on to other topics. Then the lights dimmed and the previews started. I don't think they showed as many previews back then as they do now, and pretty soon the film began. Shortly after the opening credits had run, only a couple of minutes into the film, four people from the row in front of us, two couples, began filing out. We both wondered what was going on. Had they decided so soon that they didn't like the film? Or had they already seen most of it and just wanted to catch the opening credits? We found out what was up soon enough. One of the guys leaned over to Barry, and in an incensed, menacing tone said, "Next time you feel like talking about toupees you're going to have to get yourself a set of false teeth!"

I could tell that Barry was shaken. "I had no idea there was a guy with a toupee in front of us," he said.

"You see," I said, "he had one of the good ones!"

Weird Candy: Lamb Curry Caramel

2010-05-03T18:52:00.001-04:00

I have Donna and Masa to thank for this gift from Japan, much easier to share with my coworkers than their previous gift from Japan, paper underwear from a vending machine. The underpants were supposed to be large, but they were closer to my shoe or glove size than my underwear size, Japanese large. "Didn't they have sumo-size," I asked.

These Genghis Khan caramels from Hokkaido were, I was told, lamb curry flavored. And, indeed, they had a pronounced curry flavor mixed with a caramel sweetness, a hint of onion and the slight taste of a meat bullion. It was a novelty, and it was far from foul, but it didn't really speak to me. So I brought them to my office. Few took me up on the offer. "Two weird," more than one said. A couple who did try them said things to the effect of "odd, but not bad." One person, however, bit in and exclaimed, "This is awesome!" He got seconds.

I Like Plum Wine

2010-04-26T20:30:00.000-04:00

I confess: I like plum wine. Sure it's the Manischewitz of Japan, pure confection, but I enjoy it after a Japanese meal. And it's cheap--about five bucks a glass at most Japanese restaurants. One doesn't speak of plum wine vintage. The brand is apparently of no consequence, as most restaurant menus just list plum wine, period. There's no such thing as "a very good year" for plum wine. Sauternes it ain't, by a country mile, or Moscato by a longshot, but I like it.

One Japanese restaurant I used to frequent served plum wine sorbet in the summer. The menu said "adults only."

My grandmother always ate stewed prunes, for regularity. Whenever I used to visit her, as a kid, I ate some of her stewed prunes. I loved my grandmother and I loved her stewed prunes.

Maybe that's why I like plum wine.

Korean Chinese

2010-04-17T13:00:00.000-04:00

There's no real Chinatown in Seoul proper, as far as I know, but there's a cluster of Chinese restaurants near the Chinese Embassy in Myeong-Dong, not far from where I was staying. I went out one sub-freezing evening in search of some Korean Chinese food and went into the restaurant that was the most crowded.

Korean Chinese food is a distinct cuisine. While many dishes are based on Northern Chinese food, they've been modified significantly. One of the most famous noodle dishes is jjajiang myun, a variant on chachiang mein, which on English-language menus is also known as noodles in hot brown meat sauce, or noodles with meat sauce Peking style. But the Korean version has a thicker, sweeter sauce, and usually seafood instead of meat. I find the Korean Chinese version too heavy in general.

Another noodle dish, which seems to have been invented by Chinese in Korea, is jjam ppong. It's a very spicy seafood noodle soup (shown at top) that could be mistaken by the casual observer for linguine with mussels--but that ain't no tomato sauce, that's a broth full of crushed red chili peppers. The version I had at this place was the best I've ever tasted, though I prefer my noodles chewier than they served them.

I also ordered the ma po tofu over rice. It was fairly close to a true Chinese version, except that the spice was purely from red chilies, not Sichuan peppercorns, so there was no tongue tingle. It was certainly better than those cornstarch-thickened brown monstrosities that American Chinese restaurants call bean curd Szechuan style.

I can't tell you the name of the restaurant because the only English on the sign said "Chinese Restaurant." The Chinese owner or manager knew enough English to warn, "Both dishes very spicy!"

"That's OK," I said, figuring "Bring it on!" might not be as easily understood.

Two Collaborations with Don Skiles

2010-04-12T15:03:00.002-04:00

Last summer Don and I published the first of our collaborations. Two more have just gone online this month.

The latest issue of Snow Monkey features a piece where I cut up, shuffled and abbreviated an already abstract piece of Don's and then added a few strokes here and there. It's called "Days Lost to History with No Eyewitness."

"Mercy, Mercy,Mercy," which appears in Eclectica, is much more narrative. It's actually based on two different unfinished/abandoned pieces of Don's.

The Lower East Side of France

2010-04-08T19:50:00.000-04:00

It's fitting that Antibes Bistro, a Southern French-Mediterranean restaurant, is on the Lower East Side. After all, the Cote d'Azure is geographically the lower east side of France, right? All right, it's a stretch.

I was alerted to the place thanks to a Chowhound who responded to my request for leads on new, moderately priced downtown restuarants. I had specifically asked about restaurants in the East Village or Lower East Side that opened within the past two years and featured entrees under $20. When I saw the Antibes Bistro menu I was determined to try it soon.

With its mix of French, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern flavors, the menu reminds me a bit of an old favorite, now gone, Le Tableau. In fact, the menu features several items familiar from Le Tableau (e.g., chicken under brick and salmon with phyllo pastry), which makes me wonder whether the owner or chef were ever connected with that establishment. Either way, Antibes Bistro is a delight, and a great bargain to boot.

An appetizer of lamb boulettes ($9) with eggplant, pine nuts, tahini and harissa oil was certainly more Middle Eastern than French, and certainly delicious.

For my main course I chose the pan seared tuna ($16). It was served atop a saffron parsnip puree with caramelized leeks and greens. It was a generous portion, and my only complaint was that it came medium rather than my requested medium-rare.

Sides, though by no means necessary considering the accompaniments included with main courses, are very reasonably priced, and the rich Parmesan risotto ($5) can easily be shared by two or even three. The haricots verts ($3) were over-salted, unfortunately.

Up to this point dinner was excellent, enough to ensure a return visit, but I had no idea that the dessert would be such a blockbuster that it would overshadow everything else.

It's not especially photogenic, but the halvah kattaifi ($6) is a dessert to remember. This is another nod to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Kattaifi (0r katayifi, kataifi, kadayif) is a shredded wheat pastry found in Turkey, Greece and the Middle East, often served with honey, sometimes with cream. The Antibes Bistro creation takes the kattaifi, layers it with Mascarpone blended with espresso, tops it with sesame halvah threads that mirror the wheat shreds, and throws in a bit of pomegranate molasses.

I shared the appetizer, dessert and sides with a friend, but on average three full courses should average about $30 (the most expensive entree is the $18 steak). That's cheaper than a Restaurant Week dinner, and better than many.

Antibes Bistro is a welcome addition to the Lower East Side restaurant scene. And if you do dine there, you have to get the kattaifi. In fact, there should be a law.

Antibes Bistro

112 Suffolk St. (Between Rivington and Delancey)

(212) 533-6088

My Ellingtonia

2010-04-05T16:07:00.002-04:00

The latest Mung Being, the Tribute issue, includes my piece "Mood Indigo," which is, of course, a tribute to Duke Ellington.

I wrote the piece while listening to the original Ellington recording of the tune, trying to capture the mood of "Mood Indigo" in prose.

Howard and the Jewish Mother Theory of Korean Cuisine

2010-04-02T19:24:00.001-04:00

I was trying for anything but a Jewish mother culinary experience, actually. It was my intention, for my last meal in Seoul, to eat bossam--pork belly. A reader and fellow chowhound had commented on my mandoo post that he had a suggestion for pork belly restaurants. There are a bunch of these places in the Dongdaemun area that serve the fatty pork with sauces and leaves for rolling. He suggested I take the subway to the Dongdaemun Stadium station, get out at a particular exit and "follow your nose." Well, as far as following my nose, when it's 18 degrees outside, there ain't much for your nose to follow. I wandered around a bit, but no places seemed to be candidates. I stopped into one restaurant. "Bossam?" I asked the waitress. No luck, and when she asked some patrons if they knew of bossam places they drew blanks. I wandered in a few different directions, stopping into shops. "Bossam restaurant?" I'd ask. One guy pointed down a long street and implied there might be one down that way, if I turned the corner. Well, I couldn't find anything that looked like a likely suspect, and I was getting a lot further away from the area my correspondent had recommended. Besides, I was pressed for time, as I had to catch a bus to the airport for my flight to Phnom Penh. I decided to cut my losses and head back toward my hotel.

Near the hotel I found a little place in an alley that had pictures of their dishes outside. One of them was samgyetang, ginseng chicken soup, which I'd been meaning to try. I went in and ordered by pointing to the pictures on the wall. I ordered the samgyetang and a shake that was like a cross between a lassi and a Latin American batida. I don't know what the fruit was, or if the tartness was from the fruit or yogurt.

Samgyetang is a young chicken stuffed with rice and cooked in a broth with ginseng, herbs and some dried fruit (I found a cherry). I was thinking it was sort of like Jewish-style chicken in the pot, and probably equally good as a palliative for the common cold.

I was reminded of all the times my friend Howard has marveled at the similarities to of certain Korean dishes to traditional old-world Jewish cookery. Howard works in the West 30s, so we often meet for lunch in Manhattan's "Koreatown." Howard had a Jewish mother from the old country who could guilt you with the best of them, but she tempered the guilt with good chow. I think his first epiphany of the Korean-Jewish culinary connection was when eating dduk mandoo kuk, dumpling and rice cake soup. "These are kreplach!" he declared. Of the boiled beef in some Korean soups he said, "Flanken!" I think he has a point. There's something very haimish about many Korean dishes. Just don't try to sell your Jewish mother any pork bellies.

Green Curry Miso Ramen, an Idea Whose Time Should Never Have Come

2010-03-29T16:47:00.000-04:00

I had read about ZuZu Ramen shortly after it opened a year ago, on the cusp of Park Slope, Boerum Hill and Gowanus, not far from where I live, but I didn't make it there until earlier this month. It had opened to rave reviews from New York Magazine, Time Out and The Village Voice. Park Slope's got a ramen shop, hurrah, hurrah, they hailed. Either all those reviewers were on crack or I caught ZuZu Ramen on a really bad day. My guess is they all fell for the restaurant's own hype.

Much was made of the executive chef's pedigree: he had worked in the kitchens at Lespinasse and Jean Georges after having apprenticed at his father's noodle shop in Nagoya. They all talked about how Akihiro Moroto was taking bold liberties with ramen tradition. All the reviews highlighted the green curry miso ramen, chef Moroto's own creation. I was skeptical, but I figured if the place was going for audacity I'd meet it on its own terms.

What I ended up with was one of the foulest, most ridiculous things I've been served in a restaurant in quite some time. First of all, the mixture of green curry paste and miso is a salty-spicy train wreck. It reminded me of something, but I couldn't quite place it. Then it came to me: this is what Comet cleanser would probably taste like.

As for the noodles, the "ramen," these were more like thin Cantonese yellow noodles, cooked too long, pasty and clumped up into little balls. This monstrous culinary blasphemy wasn't helped in the least by the big hunks of dry, stringy, flavorless pork shoulder.

At lunch, they also offer complimentary dumplings, pork or vegetable. I had the pork ones, which were more like Korean mandoo than Japanese gyoza. They were incredibly greasy, and the oil tasted rather "off."

The hurrahs will have to wait. Park Slope is still waiting for a proper ramen shop.

ZuZu Ramen
173 Fourth Avenue (corner of Degraw)
Brooklyn

Toby's Dangerously Delicious Dessert Calzone

2010-03-29T16:46:00.000-04:00

I've already written about Toby's brilliant brunch pizza. And Adam Kuban has recently written a nice piece on Slice about their dinner pizzas (including the excellent pancetta model, which I had). So this time I'm just gonna talk about dessert.

They say it's for two, but don't believe them. It'll serve four and you still don't want to know the calories per serving. It's the dessert calzone ($13), made with ricotta impastata (a very smooth, creamy ricotta) and Nutella. If you have food guilt issues you might want to stay away from this.

Nutella, just in case you don't know, is a hazelnut-chocolate spread that was developed in Italy in the 1940s and is incredibly popular in Europe. While it's readily available in the U.S., I've mostly eaten it at hotels in Italy and Switzerland, where it's commonly served as a breakfast spread.

Just imagine, if you will, hot, creamy ricotta consorting with Nutella, oozing out of a chewy wood fired calzone crust dusted with powdered sugar. Imagine a forkful of this wondrous creation, both comforting and vaguely disconcerting (in the best of ways, of course). Then quit imagining. Go.

This is a destination dessert.

TOBY'S PUBLIC HOUSE. 686 6th Avenue (at 21st Street), Brooklyn, NY 11215 718.788.1186

Cambodge et la Cuisine Francaise

2010-03-27T14:18:00.001-04:00

If you're spending more than a few days in Cambodia you probably won't want to be eating Khmer cuisine all the time. While I did discover some restaurants that do fantastic things with the traditional cuisine of Cambodia, there's much less variety than in, say, Vietnam or Thailand. Siem Reap is such a tourist hub for Angkor and surrounding temples that Western restaurants abound, but I wouldn't think of trying any of the Mexican or Italian places. French is another matter, as I'd heard that one could get some truly excellent French food in town. It makes sense. Not only is there the colonial legacy, but there are so many French expats working on restoration and development projects. Khmer cuisine itself doesn't bear the French influence to any real extent, by the way, as Vietnamese does.

Samot is a small restaurant in the crowded, touristy Pub Street area of Siem Reap specializing in French-inspired seafood dishes. Though the menu doesn't state it specifically, it's a small plates restaurant, so 2-3 dishes per person would be in order. I tried two dishes. The jumbo prawns flambe in a whiskey sauce with Kampot peppercorns (fabulously aromatic peppercorns from the Kampot highlands of Cambodia) were brilliant, and I soaked up every last bit of peppercorn-laden sauce with the restaurant's excellent bread. Not nearly as stunning, but still good, were the baked red snapper filets, served over green beans in what I took to be a meuniere sauce. According to the menu the dish was to be served with eggplant caviar, but it appeared that wild mushrooms were a replacement that evening. Samot is a small, comfortable, casual place. It's a gem in a thicket of mediocre, tourist-oriented restaurants. It's in the passage between the Old Market and Pub Street. I refuse to link to the website, as it commits all the crimes endemic to bad restaurant websites.

I had a chance to meet the charming chef/owner Patrick Guerry on my way out. According to his CV, he's been around the block, or at least the world, with stints in St. Bart's, the Maldives, and a Florida-based cruise line before arriving in Cambodia to head the kitchen at the Sofitel Angkor. After that he set out on his own, and opened Samot a couple of years ago. When I told Guerry I wrote about food he suggested I try another French restaurant in town, Abacus.

Abacus is a bit more of a formal restaurant, with a larger menu and full-size main courses. It is now in its second location, which conveniently was right across the road from my hotel. The owner is from the South of France, and that's reflected in the menu, which is done on a blackboard, as it changes weekly. So much of the menu was tempting, but I wasn't ravenous that evening, so I only went for a main course, leg of lamb, which was wonderful, in a very complementary black olive sauce and cooked perfectly medium-rare per my request. One can choose two sides from a generous list. I chose the ratatouille (good but not really special) and black rice. The owner told me that their lamb is sourced from Australia (leg and shank) and New Zealand (chops). The serving was enormous, and I just couldn't handle the prospect of dessert, which is a shame, because the warm apple tart with Kampot peppercorns and soy ice cream seemed so intriguing.

I didn't drink wine with my meals, as I wasn't really in a drinking mood. I'd say for food alone, expect to pay $15-25 per person at either restaurant. Expensive by Cambodia standards but a steal for French food of this quality.

The Best Damn Deli Sandwich in Brooklyn

2010-03-24T07:06:00.000-04:00

And it took a homesick Montrealer to bring it to us. Mile End, which opened a couple of months ago in Boerum Hill, is named for a Montreal neighborhood that has been home to numerous European immigrant groups over the years. It's a Montreal-style deli-cafe that offers a number of that city's specialties, including smoked meat, poutine, and Montreal bagels imported from St. Viateur.

Not so long ago I researched the current Brooklyn Jewish deli sandwich scene. One of the places I visited, Jay and Lloyd's, had a formidable pastrami but a piss-poor corned beef.

Mile End's house-cured smoked meat is better than any pastrami or corned beef in Brooklyn, certainly up to a contest with any in Manhattan, and even better than lots of smoked meat in Montreal. The Montreal smoked meat process involves both smoking and slow steaming, which gives it a pastrami-like flavor with more of a corned-beef consistency, the best of two worlds. But even in Montreal you'll find that the texture varies from place to place. Indeed, most Montreal smoked meats I've tried (e.g., Reuben's and the now-defunct Ben's) had a rather smooth, slippery surface to the sliced meat. Not until I tried Schwartz's, with the craggy texture of a good old New York corned beef, did I find a smoked meat I could truly love. Well, Mile End's smoked meat is clearly modeled on the Schwartz's style.

The meat is hand-sliced, but Mile End slices theirs much thicker than any I've had in Montreal--a tad too thick, I'd say. It is wonderfully moist, with a good fat to lean ratio. My only real complaint is the overabundance of black peppercorns, which threatens to overpower the other flavors. The sandwiches, at $8, might be smaller than the humongous New York deli sandwiches of today, but they're quite ample, and ounce for ounce I'd say more bang for the buck. The meat tends to act a bit unruly and tumble out of the bread, partly due to the thickness of the slices.

A little more slicing finesse and a little less black pepper and this smoked meat could be a contender for the best damn deli sandwich in all New York.

Mile End

97A Hoyt Street
Brooklyn, New York 11217
718.852.7510