Mu Ramen

14 January 2017

Long Island City isn’t the easiest place to get to, and it’s not a food destination per se. Some places serve as a good reason to venture out to a neighborhood less traveled. Mu Ramen is one of those places.

I remember visiting them years ago when they were just a pop-up inside of a Long Island City bagel shop in some warehouse-y stretch by the water, and there was already this rare sense of comfort and wonder about the food. Ippudo is reliable and reliably busy, Setagaya is a dive, Takashi is pure indulgence – those ramen spots have their feel and familiarity. Mu has a sense of refinement, sureness about its craft, and confidence in turning up the details and luxury in its versions of things you think you know.

Look at the beautiful uni. And ikura. And under that pile of rich umami goodness some nori rice and spicy tuna and rice. Fresh AF. And fried chicken wings stuffed with foie gras. A little decadent, delightfully crispy without being gummy or over-breaded or oily. A little dangerous to bite into because the foie gras is pretty hot. Delicious though. This deeply satisfying shoyu duck broth. So good. Interesting to have a non-chicken clear broth. The duck broth is gorgeously rich without being fatty, bright and complex, something you just want to keep sipping on a chilly day. The runny egg, creamy, just melts in your mouth. I don’t remember what this tonkotsu-looking bowl was – maybe the Mu Ramen? At that point, my mind was already a little mushy from deliciousness.

Mu Ramen (menu)
1209 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101

Gramercy Tavern, Rounds 2 and 3 – Burgers, Burgers for Everybody

31 December 2016

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The one thing that I didn’t get the first go-around in the tasting menu at Gramercy Tavern was the infamous burger, which is only available in the Tavern.

Gourmet burgers, the ultimate high-brow/low-brow question mark at so many restaurants in the city, have been having their moment for a while – and as much as I hate being a sucker for food media-driven trendspotting, when it comes to burgers, I’m still a sucker for a good one. Let’s be honest, I’ll always be a sucker for a good burger. And sometimes, even if you’re at a fine-ass restaurant, you want a burger. This is one of those burgers that won’t make you regret ordering one.

I mean, for the love of God, just look at that. A lot of housemade details: condiments, brioche-y bun, potato chips, pickled chilis, cured bacon. These things, plus a lava flow of funky white cheddar.

Most importantly, you can really taste the beef, the grind and the juices. The patty does not break into chunks. The bun holds its weight against the grease drip and the heft of the meat. I guess I’m not really surprised, but nevertheless it’s a damn delicious piece of culinary engineering.

Power lunch Wednesday, pt3: this medium-rare bad boy @gramercytavern #latergram #eeeeeats

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Some stupid-delicious blend of beef cuts (a base of chuck, plus brisket and short rib). That’s a good mix, flavorful, still a little bloody, beefy/funky, fatty, done medium-rare.

Gramercy Tavern (menu)
42 E 20th St, New York, NY
(212) 477-0777

Gramercy Tavern, Round 1 – Lunch Tasting Menu

30 December 2016

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It took me several years before I finally made it to Gramercy Tavern. But I felt right at home as soon as I stepped inside with Francesca (whose sister works on the line at GT) and her friend, thanks to that gorgeous dining room. (Seriously, that restaurant is beautiful.) A lot of suits having power lunches, some Asian tourists, and the three of us scallywags sneaking away from work for this treat-yo’self-type situation.

I came ready to eat. The tasting menu, which at $65 (excluding drinks and before tax/tip), is of pretty decent value. On a broader note, a lot of fine-ass New York restaurants have really good lunch deals. More on that in later posts.

Bread. Butter. Yay.

Bread and butter to start, plus a zero-proof cocktail called the Cosmonot (pinot noir juice, grenadine, citrus). Probably a better pairing with the meats that came later, but a strong punch of tartness to kickstart the meal.

A spicy tuna tartar with heirloom tomatoes. Sweet corn and corn mousse with cherry tomatoes. A crudo with mussels, salmon roe, and cucumber broth. Light and fresh to start, alternating notes of spice, sugar, and salt.

Arctic char with corn, popcorn, and plum. This was probably my favorite dish of the meal, if not for the whimsy then for the tender fish paired in a beautiful way with that sliver of plum. This the second time I’ve been pleasantly surprised by fish and fruit (the other time: tuna and strawberry, courtesy of Arzak). Continue reading →

Stockholm Escapades – Pt 2: Oaxen Krog

30 December 2016

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The other half of Oaxen is Krog, this polished open-kitchen powerhouse of a fine dining establishment.

We sat at a communal table for six people, sharing the same tasting menu, some with wine pairings and myself with the juice pairing. Initially, I didn’t know we’d signed up for the communal dinner, but it turned out to be one of my favorite meal experiences – not just in an asterisk’d way (like, favorite meal in a foreign country or something) – but one of my favorite meals. It was a four-hour marathon, paved with luxurious bites and flavors, blessed with laughter and stories, that showcased the magic connectivity of what good food and drink can conjure at a dinner table of strangers.

We started with some amuse-bouches. Not all of these I remember, but the bone marrow dish had a really nice clean finish. And I’m always about that head-on shrimp.

Oaxen Krog also served up some luxurious bread – some brioche knobs, some fresh butter, and this warm black bread, savory, sea-salt crunch, syrupy sweet. Basically cake with butter at mid-meal. It was cool to share the meal with Swedes who had grown up eating variants of these dishes, obviously more homey versions, to see them wax nostalgic about their childhood food memories and the long-ago places and times that these flavors recalled. I just love that stuff. Food with stories, with soul. Continue reading →

Stockholm Escapades – Pt 1: Oaxen Slip

30 December 2016

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One of the small blessings of travel and studying abroad is that you meet and befriend folks from different walks of life, corners of the map which you hadn’t previously visited, people who grew up in different circumstances, with different interests. In the decade since, my path and theirs have often diverged even further on many levels – jobs, education, geography, experience, love, food. But it’s also funny how life (and discount airlines offering an undeniable deal) can reconnect those threads.

We were in Stockholm in mid-winter to visit Antony, an Australian friend from my year abroad in Paris who found a career in foreign service and who was now assigned to the consulate in Stockholm. Stockholm, and Scandinavia in general, was a first for me, so we’d lucked out having a second bedroom in a lovely, light-filled apartment in Kungsholmen as a home base for a few days.

A few of our meals brought us Oaxen, a restaurant on the quiet south side of Djurgarden, past the Vasa and ABBA museums (yes, it’s a thing). Oaxen is split into two parts, the more casual Oaxen Slip and the two-Michelin-starred Oaxen Krog. We ate at both, and had a swell time at both.

This post is just for Oaxen Slip, where we shared a meal with two friends who live in Stockholm. The fried mushroom, meaty and savory, was delicious. Whoever thought to butter-fry the rye bread is a genius – it inverted the experience of that dish. There’s a giant boat suspended over your head, which lends both a surreal quality to your dining experience, but also connects you to the idea of Sweden so far as I have any idea of Sweden, a country and a culture long on seafaring and seafood, on craft and simplicity. None of these dishes felt overthought or overworked – each dish was three or four things done well and in earnest.

Housemade soda at Oaxen Slip in Stockholm

Fried mushrooms at Oaxen Slip in Stockholm

Herring with fried rye bread, potatoes, sour cream at Oaxen Slip in Stockholm

Oaxen Slip charcuterie Stockholm restaurant

Steak and herb butter at Oaxen Slip in Stockholm

Lamb and yogurt at Oaxen Slip in Stockholm

Oaxen Slip
Beckholmsvägen 26
115 21 Stockholm, Sweden

One Night in Nashville – Hattie B’s Hot Chicken

21 August 2016

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Earlier this year, I stopped by Nashville for a hot second to visit a hotel trade show (the Asian American Hotel Owners Association – long story). The trip also had a great chicken-related benefit – the opportunity to eat at Hattie B’s Hot Chicken.

I jumped out of my Uber and saw a big line – a good sign. Luckily, I had phoned in my order in advance. Half bird to go, baby, with mac & cheese and some banana pudding!

The order wasn’t ready yet when I checked in, so I stood by the pass and watched the goodness go by (other people’s orders…alas). Look at all that beautiful nonsense.

Hattie B's hot chicken nashville tennessee fried chicken

I got half of my order hot, and the other mild. Definitely get the hot – not that the mild was at all bad, but the hot was so much better. Hattie B’s does a good brine, so that the chicken is juicy and flavorful, and the spice is a great first hit paired with the crispy skin, right before that beautiful smooth music of brined chicken grease and dark meat comes through right after like that soft bass on a slow jam. The heat is not overwhelming (I felt like it was mostly cayenne), and builds as you eat, so you get a little bit of that delirious nose-sweat by the time you’re done, but mostly it was an excellent partner and facilitator of flavor.

Definitely some of the top chicken in the land, right up there with Willie Mae’s.

A Day of Eating in Sunset Park

14 August 2016

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A few months ago, I took a waistband-stretching jaunt through Sunset Park, a quiet neighborhood in the southern edges of Brooklyn, eating a bunch of Chinese food (and a stop at a phenomenal banh mi shop as well). Sunset Park sits south of Red Hook and surrounded by other names that do not yet mean much to me, like Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst. I know each of these neighborhoods have long histories of settlement, trade, migration, immigrants, and the attendant richness of food culture that come with tides of people flowing in and out of the region. In recent years, these areas are the landing spots of Chinese immigrants, particularly from my home province of Fujian.

Predictably, I went for the food, and made a list of places to hit up, guided in part by Andy Ricker’s Instagram:

East Harbor Seafood Palace, for late morning dim sum
Ba Xuyen, for banh mi and Vietnamese coffee
Yunnan Flavor Garden, for a bowl of hot and sour dumplings
Golden Imperial Palace, for some tablecloth’d Cantonese eats

Emerging from the 59th Street N-R station and strolling up and down Eighth Ave, I found a quieter, more residential replica of Flushing, restaurants and shops catering to the Chinese community, shoppers picking their way through crates of seafood, grandparents pushing strollers, the throat-y rap of Fuzhou dialect bursting from dining rooms and cash registers.

Sunset Park Chinatown Eighth Ave Brooklyn NYC

Fish Market Sunset Park Chinatown Eighth Ave Brooklyn NYC

Vegetable Market Sunset Park Chinatown Eighth Ave Brooklyn NYC

The first stop was East Harbor Seafood for some dim sum. For a mid-week morning, the dining room was surprisingly packed with families, including some really big round tables full up with three or four generations, old and young. I shared a table with two ladies talking in a dialect I didn’t understanding, enjoying my personal array of dim sum classics – steamed tofu skin, spare ribs with black bean sauce, shu mai, and a personal favorite, chicken feet, finished with a bowl of fresh silken tofu drizzled with simple syrup:

east harbor seafood palace sunset park chinatown brooklyn nyc

dining room east harbor seafood palace sunset park chinatown brooklyn nyc

chicken feet shu mai dumplings east harbor seafood palace sunset park chinatown brooklyn nyc

black bean spare ribs east harbor seafood palace sunset park chinatown brooklyn nyc

pei guen east harbor seafood palace sunset park chinatown brooklyn nyc

dim sum east harbor seafood palace sunset park chinatown brooklyn nyc

soft tofu dessert east harbor seafood palace sunset park chinatown brooklyn nyc

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Roberta’s – Pizza and Beards in Bushwick

16 March 2016

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Disregard for a moment the disturbingly high concentration of beards and low-necked tees, the flannel everything nightmare that Bushwick can sometimes me. Because the pizza at Roberta’s is sufficiently delicious enough to offset any visceral reaction you might have to the amount of hipsters. The Bee Sting (spicy soppressata, hot honey, tomatoes, mozzarella) and the White Guy (mozz, ricotta, garlic, olive oil, sea salt) are the two I’ve had most often, and ones that I’d go back to again and again. Particularly the bee sting – I wouldn’t have ever thought to put honey on a pizza or with soppressata, but here we are, in a new age of Brooklyn consumption.

White Guy. Ricotta, grana, garlic with speck @robertaspizza @urbanspacenyc. #eeeeeats

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White Guy w pepperoni @robertaspizza @urbanspacenyc. Lunchtime #eeeeeats. Awesome to have Mad Sq Eats back near the office.

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Other pizzas eaten: the Millenium Falco (sausage, basil, onion, tomato, parmigiano) and the Cheesus Christ (mozz, taleggio, black pepper, parm, cream). The latter is a commitment, an expectedly gooey and umami-pumped experience of food coma, but if you’re especially hungry, it’s a solid choice.

The crust at Roberta’s is fluffier and more doughy than my ideal pizza crust – which will always and forever be Nancy Silverton’s at Pizzeria Mozza – but with a good char in the oven, it does the trick just fine. The topping flavors are bold and that’s what I go for.

Sometimes though, the line at Roberta’s can get real long – I’ve heard two hours or more for weekend lunches. That inconvenience, more than anything else, is the tough part to navigate, especially if you’re trekking from Manhattan and have some modicum of schedule you want to stick to.

If you just want to satisfy a pizza craving, go next door to Roberta’s take-out shop and grab whatever you were going to wait for an hour and a half for, plus a few gloriously good sticky buns for the road. Speaking of sticky buns, if you do take a seat in the restaurant, they have (or had) a dessert sandwich of a big scoop of ice cream stuck between halves of a warmed-over sticky bun, buttery and salty and sticky-sweet. Phenomenal and impossible to eat with two hands.

The take-out menu is more limited and doesn’t have the veggie and meat dishes that the restaurant offers, but it does cover the greatest hits, so do what that what you will. I haven’t tried enough of the veggie dishes to vouch for them as much as they are hyped elsewhere, but as long as you’re not sacrificing pizza consumption I’m on board with whatever you do.

Roberta has branched out to the city as well, as an integral part of the Urbanspace experience, first at Mad Sq Eats, then Broadway Bites, and now at Vanderbilt, the upscale food court that Urbanspace has installed near Grand Central. Oh, and you can get their frozen pizzas in a bunch of Whole Foods in the city. Good job on the expansion, fellas.

Roberta’s (Google Maps)

Modern Lunch – Untitled at the Whitney, NYC

28 July 2015

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Untitled (Google Maps) sits on the ground floor of the new Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, a glass temple to vegetable-driven cooking that’s increasingly caught on in New York. All that smack dab in the middle of the human crush of glorified day drinking, family outings, and tourist throngs curious about the High Line that is the Meatpacking District. Food aside, it’s simply a gorgeous place to take it all in.

Space in New York, in almost any capacity, feels like an extreme luxury, so to see Untitled’s soaring ceilings and uninhibited glass enclosure is like walking into the foyer of an unexpectedly wealthy friend and thinking daaaaaaayum. Good on ya, Danny Meyer.

Michael Anthony, Gramercy Tavern’s head impresario, oversees the kitchen. Union Square Hospitality Group is behind the venture, as well as the upstairs cafe.

The food is meant to share, portions relatively small, the plating bordering on minimalist, the flavors a dance of sharp and broad and muted. There’s spice but only barely (the chili in the leeks), there’s an earthy chlorophyllic sweetness on full blast (the kale & sugar snap peas in the fried & roast chicken salad), there’s rich crab umami in the crispy croquettes, smeared with aioli.

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The Old and the New – Morgenstern’s, NYC

27 July 2015

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Morgenstern’s (Finest Ice Cream) feels in some ways like an anachronism. Like a soda bar or something, a page out of old Archie. Or something from a Michel Gondry movie, an All-American ice cream shop off a lonely stretch of Bowery (Google Maps) murmuring with junkies and others just barely hanging onto the margins of society.

On the other hand, Morgenstern’s makes damn good ice cream, so who cares about the throwback paper caps and the retro menu. But then again, the menu isn’t all that retro, with nods to Kanye and chef collaborations, is both cloyingly hipster and creative.

Raw egg and coffee cluster. Vietnamese coffee. Mango passion fruit. Luxardo cherries, toasted coconut toppings. Smooth strawberry.