Category: Reviews
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What a lovely place. Dim, warm mood lighting, dark wood, glass bottles against white walls, touches of sage gray, modern branch arrangements, parchment colored menus. We walked in at 7:30 on a Saturday night and had no trouble getting a roomy table for three. Started with a generous $10 app of crispy breadcrumbed chicken livers with soft whole shallots, haricots verts and frisee. For entree, I had rabbit ragout with pappardelle -- restrained and elegant, ribbons of fresh pasta in a very light, brothy ragout with slivers of zucchini, sun-dried tomato and fresh parsley. Sprightly spring simplicity. Winnie's pulled pork was sweet and well-spiced, with a side of cider vinegar splashed collards. Crisp and tender biscuit halves looked so golden and beautiful in the candlelight that I wanted to make love to them. Winnie tells me their brunch of those sexy biscuits with sausage gravy is fantastic. I may break my no brunch out rule to try it. Desserts were excellent, the favorite being the warm, round walnut cake (steamed?), topped with a fan of poached pear, dipping its edge into a pool of dark, sticky caramel and leaning up against a quenelle pillow of creme fraiche. Divine. Total per person, with tax and tip, was $38. Brooklyn's got Manhattan beat when it comes to combining hip class with comfort. It's becoming harder and harder to find a good reason to leave the borough on the weekends.
Flatbush Farm
76 St. Marks Ave. @ 6th Ave.
Brooklyn
718.622.3276
My friend Jim and I are trying to figure out whether or not it would be a good thing to live in Flushing. On the one hand, you could have amazing (if MSG laden) food every night of the week, Chinese crullers and hot soy milk for breakfast, endless fruits and veggies all the time. On the other hand, it's like stepping out into teeming, ZPG China every morning. We are out in Flushing to meet Winnie for eats in a weird little mall off Main St. on her suggestion.
Near the entrance, I see a white couple looking as intimidated as I feel by the near total lack of signage in English. Chinese operetta review is blasting from a flat screen in the DVD mart in the front. Through a glass window, I watch a man methodically stuff rounds of dough with chive and pork filling, magically forming them into plump, airtight little Zoloft cartoon blimps. Behind him, another woman uses a long stemmed strainer to gather white fish balls from a huge vat of boiling water, arranging them on a tray lined with terry cloth towels. While we wait for Winnie, we ask for an order of each.
"To stay or to go?" the vendor asks me.
"Stay," I say. I give her my money.
"Stay!" she barks at me and cursorily waves towards the little tables next to her stall. We sit down obediently. We are rewarded with steaming white fish fluff stuffed with -- surprise! -- sienna seasoned pork. The broth is bland and uninteresting but those fish balls are pretty awesome. The huge platter of Zoloft dumplings are aggressively chive-y and appropriately happy making. We dunk them in a little styrofoam bowl of our own mixture of soy sauce, white vinegar, and chili sauce.
Winnie arrives and leads us to the back where, not only are there no signs in English, but the cooks probably don't speak enough for a post office transaction. (These little foreign pockets in urban areas always amaze me. I mean, how do people get around and do day to day business when their language is so limited? And why would you leave the macro-motherland only to live in a miniature version?) Winnie knows enough Chinese to order cold dishes from a glass display case set atop sawed off shopping carts. Now we're in Szechuan, where the peppercorn rules. Cubes of pressed tofu are tossed with red chili oil and tons of tawny skinned peanuts. Glistening, translucent tendon slices are gelatinous and cool, slick with savory red oil, sesame seeds and scallions. Dan dan mien, made with long bands of hand-pulled noodles and plenty of crushed Szechuan peppercorns, numbs the tongue completely with that peculiar, drug and allergy mimicking sensation. Like Winnie says, the sensation is cool -- it's not the kind of spicy you'd call "hot". Best of all are the dry-fried string beans, perfectly wilted in a super hot wok and sweet, tossed with preserved salted greens -- mustard? cabbage? -- and some savory sauce.
Jim has wandered over to the next station, where he spies a Korean-Chinese dish. He orders using the Korean name, ja jang myun, which makes the Chinese cook laugh with recognition. More hand-pulled noodles are dropped into the hot water, then topped with a salty, meaty slurry and pale green, cool julienned cucumber. "Korean ja jang myun is better," he says, but I don't know. It's like Italian pizza and New York pizza -- one may have spawned the other, but my stomach has room for both.
We sit in the grotty corner room and share everything on the red plastic laminate counter. I'm very cold in the corner and I notice a dirty white pile of something on the floor.
ME: How did snow get in here?
JIM: That's not snow. Don't look at it too closely.
ME: I swear to God, that's snow.
JIM: No it's not. Don't look at it!
We finish as much as we can, spending a grand total of $15 at the Szechuan stall. (Jim's ja jang myun was probably another $4, so with Winnie's friend P., that's less than $5 per person.) We're stuffed, but Winnie convinces us that we must share one lamb kabob from the delicious smelling cart on the corner. "For dessert," she says. A big chimney pipes heavenly hardwood coal smoke onto Main Street. The meat on a stick is not quite a kabob, not quite satay -- the signs are in Chinese, and the Chinese men at the grill line up a long row of the briskly selling bamboo skewered meats. I'm sure I don't have room, but Winnie insists I have a bite. What a bite! The tender, perfectly 'cued thin lamb meat is dusted with a magic pixie dust. I definitely taste cumin, red pepper, maybe coriander? It's divine. I am dreaming of this lamb skewer now. I could make a meal of just those lamb skewers, spend $10 on ten of them and be happier than a carnivorous mafioso at Peter Luger. The makeshift trash can is a red tub that used to hold 100 kg of MSG. I am of the don't ask don't tell policy when it comes to MSG, but even that will not deter me from gorging on those kabobs again.
Can't wait to go back to Flushing. Do you realize how lucky we are to live in New York? Thailand is only a few stops on the 7 train from China, which is just down the street from Korea, and a stone's throw from Greece and Italy. I'm still not sure about living in Flushing, but I'm looking forward to further research.
J & L Mall
Main St. between Maple & Sanford
Flushing, Queens
On the weekends, it's easiest to take the LIRR to Flushing Main St. Don't complain about the $10 round trip off peak ticket -- you can binge like a fiend for $10.
Went to the December 30 re-opening of Ruen Pair on Hollywood Blvd. and I'm happy to report that the place has expanded and cleaned up real good, the servers are still sweet as pie, the "kitchenmothers" (Thai for cooks) are all the same, and the food is still TO DIE FOR. It's still my favorite Thai restaurant anywhere. Punchy tom yum goong with flecks of roasted chili and barely cooked shrimp; dry-cured and fried moo daed diew that manages to be sweet, salty, crisp, moist, and tender all at once; red fire morning glory, crisp and green, with whole yellow beans and whole thai chilies; and of course, my favorite som tam anywhere, spicy as sin, made with salted crab, not sweet, with hand sliced papaya bruised by the deftest pestle hand on this side of the Pacific. And it's so cheap -- $90 with tax and tip for 10 dishes, 4 servings of sticky rice and regular rice -- I could sit there and eat all day long if my Mae would let me. If I lived in L.A., I'd eat there once a week. At least.
Saw the owner while we were there, who extended friendly greetings to my Mae and Pau, who are regulars. "Closed for six months -- the customers have been so mad at us." Well, get back in there, people. The kitchen wants to prove that they've still got it, and believe me, they've still got it in spades. And they've got it in spades from 11am-4am EVERY SINGLE DAY. You people are so lucky.
Ruen Pair
5257 Hollywood Blvd. at Hobart Blvd. (close to Western)
Los Angeles, CA
(323) 466-0153
Cash only
So Sietsema turned me onto this place, and Trillin turned him onto it, and I, in turn, pass the buck to you my friends. Which means you only need a few more bucks to feast on a world class bowl of hand-pulled noodles.
At Super Taste, you don't come for the show. Harsh fluorescent lighting, tables with cracked plastic veneer, plastic tubs of pickled greens and big office plants don't exactly put you in the mood for romance. The dough slapping is not as nicely proscenium-framed as it is in the Elmhurst hand-pulled noodle joint Sietsema also turned me onto. The hand-pulling happens off on the side, where a dough dominatrix in flour-dusted jeans whacks and whips a long rope of noodle dough against a stainless steel counter. I missed having a front row seat for the culinary burlesque show to whet my appetite, but I'll trade the pre-dining titillation for the convenience of Manhattan.
A big bowl of hot and spicy beef soup comes with a sizable skep of those wheat flour mobius bands, wilted green leaf lettuce, and thinly sliced stewed beef shot through with chewy, gelatinous tendon. ("What cut of beef is this? It's such an Asian cut," said my friend Winnie.) I love the spice level -- it's just enough to make you break a gentle sweat on your upper lip, but not enough that you have to stop sipping the savory soup. (It's still got MSG, though, so if you're like me, the more soup you drink, the worse your cottonmouth gets.) The steamed pork dumplings -- a dozen fatties enrobed in white -- are pleasant, with thin skins and plenty of garlic chives, but they're a bit sweet for my taste. And the grand total for this meal, which I shared with Winnie and still felt like unbuttoning my pants? $7. $7! Slurpy goodness! I can't wait to go back and try more. I fucking love Chinatown.
Now I see that the irrepressible Sietsema's moved on to the new Fujianese kid on the block. It's probably going to take me another year to catch up with him.
Super Taste
26N Eldridge St. just below Canal St.
D, B to Grand St. or F to East Broadway
I went to a dinner with a bunch of food writers a few months ago, where I bravely posited that cheap ethnic eats in L.A. were deeper, more varied, and better than in New York. Obviously, this is a position that is often met with indignance bordering on furor. I really only said it because there was a little too much peacock talk about New York food's superiority. New York has great cheap ethnic eats, but to say it's the BEST place in the country for cheap ethnic eats isn't quite right. I'm as proud as any New Yorker, but one can't deny that L.A. has a high number of ass-kicking, undiluted, deep ethnic restaurants. Rent is cheaper, communities are more homogenous.
Case in point: my mom took my uncle, aunt and me to Baimon Restaurant in Rowland Heights, a mere 5 minute drive from our house. It's not in a notable neighborhood; it's not the kind of restaurant that will ever get a Saveur profile. The dish to order is the rad nah. Wide, soft rice noodle ribbons or fine rice vermicelli are pan fried with dark, sweet soy sauce. The noodles are topped with a small pond of thin, cornstarch slurry-thickened gravy with earthy whole bean sauce, emerald green, bittersweet Chinese broccoli sliced on the bias, and your choice of meat.
Rad nah is not a flashy dish. It seems simple enough. There are probably less than 10 ingredients in the whole dish -- not very many for a Thai dish. There are no spicy, colorful fireworks like there are in a good papaya salad. The level of difficulty in composition isn't as obvious as it is in hor mok, an elegantly banana leaf-wrapped, steamed fish curry.
Good examples can be found, but great examples are few and far between. I still remember the rad nah we used to get from the pak soi, which means "mouth of the road", where we turned in to go to my uncle's house in Thailand. The sauce was the perfect viscosity and salinity, the noodles soft and gently, sweetly charred in places, the Chinese broccoli crisp and bright.
Baimon's rad nah matches the excellence of the one from my romantic memories of the stand at the pak soi, which no longer exists. Yeah, it's that good. As my uncle said, digging in with concentration and gusto, it's "one of the best." He liked it so much, he ate it three times in the week that he spent in La Puente. We covered the table with four gravy filled platters of rad nah and pretty much cleaned our plates, which is really saying something considering my aunt, uncle and mom's dwindling appetites. Can't vouch for anything else on the menu, but I probably won't ever order anything but the rad nah anyway.
Baimon Restaurant
1741 Fullerton Rd.
Rowland Heights, CA
(626) 964-6851
So maybe you've been wondering, whither the restaurant reviews? Doesn't Ganda eat out anymore? Let me tell you something: My duodenum's been sitting on the couch watching TV in stiff boxers all day for many years, but I've got news for it. It's gonna start paying rent around here or it's gonna get K-Feded to the curb.
Introducing the first of what I hope will be many reviews on websites and in publications I let my Mae look at:
More to come...
Stopped for a sample of green tea fro-yo at Pinkberry, the new fro-yo establishment imported from L.A.
The verdict? Um, that shit is nars-TY. Like pukey ice milk. No joke. Send it back to L.A. We'll trade for some of that Armenian garlic chicken or Ruen Pair or Monterey Park dim sum or Little Tokyo crepes with matcha ice cream and red bean please.
The first of my Three Blocks lunch guides is up on NYMag.com's Grub Street now! My piece covers Lower Murray Hill. I am 2 Legit 2 Quit now, Mae!
Have you ever waited for 4 1/2 hours for a piece of cake? I have. Today. Cake Man Raven popped that cherry.
Cake Man Raven's shop is just a hot little storefront with French doors blockaded by cooling racks and a front door blockaded by an empty refrigerated display case. There are no chairs, save a few metal park-style benches on the sidewalk. There's no a/c, so the icing tends to ooze in the oven-heated room. And today, there were no cakes.
I went at 4:20, waited for 20 minutes only to be told that there would be no slices of cake available for another 30 minutes. I came back 30 minutes later, only to be told that there would be no red velvet cake for another 15 minutes. I came back 45 minutes later, only to be told that red velvet cake was sold out, and that they didn't even know when it might come out again. Finally, I returned at 8:30 to relieve Doug who had been waiting on line with a dozen like-minded, annoyed patrons for a half hour. People were pissed. I was annoyed.
A woman in front of me spoke sternly to the kid behind the register for not having more cake prepared for all of the customers lined up outside the restaurant.
"Uh-uh," she said, "Put that cake in the fridge to set it. I don't want my cake sliding around. We waited this long, we can wait a few minutes more."
She turned to the throng lined up behind her. "Right? We waited this long. You gotta speak your mind." When one cake with nuts came out, she began bagging the clamshelled slices of cake, passing them to people behind her, and passing the cash to the listless youth at the counter.
"Tell Cake to call me. Tell him I had to organize for y'all. Tell him Kativa wants to have a word with him."
I have to thank Kativa for taking charge because finally, after 4 1/2 hours of trying, I got my cake. Was it worth the wait? I don't know if any cake is worth a 4 1/2 hour wait, but this one was pretty fucking fantastic. Even though it's a touch too sweet for my taste, it's still probably the best red velvet cake I've ever had. Still slightly warm from the oven, the blood red cake had a rich cocoa flavor (likely made with the industrial sized bag of Hershey's cocoa powder which I spied on their shelf) and super buttery, unctuous moistness with a spongy crumb. The sugary cream cheese frosting, melting in the heat, had just the lightest tang and the tiny grit of powdered sugar.
Even so, it was too hot to be waiting around for hours for a piece of cake. I won't do it again. At least I won't do it again this week.
Cake Man Raven
708 Fulton St., Brooklyn
718-694-2253
C to Lafayette Ave.
