Ashish@Franchia

Ashish is a life-long vegetarian who bravely emailed me to make the point that he does not limit himself to salads just because he is a veggie-eater.

I really admired his optimism in believing that a veggie and a carnivore can be great food buddies, so I challenged him to find the perfect vegetarian place for us to eat. I figured I should also try to be more open-minded. And so I detoured, for the sake of building diplomatic ties, away from meating up and deep into vegging up.

He didn't tell me where we were going until the very day. Because he's Indian, I half-expected an Indian restaurant, since Indian cuisine lends itself so nicely to vegetarian dishes. But I was truly impressed when he suggested Franchia. Ok, I had no idea what Franchia was, but I was truly impressed after Googling it, because it's a vegan Korean place. If there's anybody that can make veggies livable food, it'd probably be someone Korean. Hello, kimchee?

It was a lovely afternoon, so we sat outside under the restaurant's awning. The warm weather, the mellow ambiance, the healthful food, my good-natured dining companion...it was all very soothing.

And that was before we even got our tea. Ashish recommended we split the tea set, which comes with two teas, a tray of appetizers, and two small desserts. The tea menu is longer than the food menu, and we finally settled on white peony tea (my choice) and an iced fruit tea (his choice).


White peony tea

I've been on a tea kick lately, and this one was AWESOME. I could drink it every day. And how adorable are these little cups with the little sieve that fits over them?

The appetizers also had a pretty presentation:



Easily the best thing on this plate was the deep-fried veggie cake on the bottom left. There wasn't even fake meat product in there, and it was super tasty. The California rolls were also surprisingly fresh-tasting, although I may have been overly-impressed at the time, having forgotten that California rolls are vegan to begin with.

The other things? Just ok.

Here is where I got an unfortunate case of food envy:


My entree: cold avocado bibimbap


Ashish's entree: so-hot-it's-blurry-because-it's-still-bubbling vegetarian curry

I should have listened to him. I really should have. He said the curry was reeeaaally good and I was all "it's too hot for curry." God I'm dumb. I took one bite and said "I like yours better." He said, "me too."

I'd eat that curry every day. I wouldn't even notice there's no meat in it, it's so rich. My bibimbap wasn't bad at all, the sauce on the side actually gave it quite a dousing of flavor. But when I used the sauce, I couldn't taste anything else. After all, it's cold tofu and cold avocado over rice - bland in a bowl.

Good thing Ashish was pretty nice about sharing his curry. We talked about vegetarianism and people's reasons for it, his being that having grown up in a family of vegetarians, meat was simply an abnormal concept. Had he tried meat before? Yes, chicken, but it was not a fall-on-your-knees-seeing-the-light experience. Ok, fair, I'm pretty over chicken myself. But I pressed on - what about steak?

He smiled. "Everyone says that. No, I haven't had a steak."
"Would you try it?" What he said next was pretty endearing:
"Ummm I don't think I could ever try a beef steak. I would never eat beef. But a chicken steak? Yes I think I could do that."

Ashish moved from India to the US in 2003 to attend grad school, and most of his family is still in India. We started talking then about Indian mangoes, because I read lately that an Indian mango is, in fact, a fall-on-your-knees-seeing-the-light experience. Perhaps the only thing Dubya did right while in office was lift an 18-year import ban on Indian mangoes in 2007. (He also reportedly said, "This is one hell of a fruit," upon tasting them for the first time during the same state visit.)

I hear that they are still wildly expensive to import and can rarely be found outside of Indian groceries and supermarkets, where they sell for $3-$4 each. Ashish confirmed that they are probably the most delicious things on earth, but said that he'd never had them in the US or knew of any places that carried them. Carbon footprint be damned, I am going to try one, because that's all I can afford. I'll go to Queens if I have to.

We wrapped up the meal with three small desserts:


Lemon pudding, vanilla ice cream, mochi

I usually don't like fruit teas, but this one was perfectly refreshing and not a bit cloying. It also had bits of crispy vegan mystery molecules floating around in it, almost like puffed rice. Delicious. The lemon pudding, which is Ashish's favorite, was less so mine. It was good, but there was an aftertaste to it I couldn't really place. Ditto the ice cream, which had me marveling at how creamy it was.

Have I been converted? Definitely not. Would I recommend Franchia next time my meat-eating friends want a good restaurant? No. Would I go there with another vegetarian? Sure, I'd probably take my mom. But here's Angela's theory on vegan food, which makes a lot of sense to me - vegan places have dual (and dueling) priorities, and much of the cost goes toward making things like pudding and ice cream vegan, which leaves less money on the table to improve in the taste department. So while there were plenty of pleasant surprises, it's only because I'm forever qualifying praise with "...for a vegan dish." For the same price, it's just hard to beat meat.

Except maybe...

from Ashish Axxxxx
to Zoe Yang
date Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 8:17 PM
subject Re: I NEED AN EATING BUDDY - w4m - 22 (Midtown East)

Hey!

Let me know if you find anything about those Indian Mangoes! I love them!

Chris@Shang

date		Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 10:52 AM
subject		Re: I NEED AN EATING BUDDY - w4m - 22 (Midtown East)
mailed-by		me.com

Hey Zoe,

I was wondering if we could change the venue to another restaurant? I am thinking something more low key, Susur is best left for a second or third outing. Some people love his food others just don't get it (even foodies).

Chris

This email raised a burning question in my mind - is there anything to "get" about food? I think not. At its craziest, maybe it's a little bit like modern art: every concept deserves a chance, deserves at least to be heard out, but people have every right to not like it without being condescended to. The fact that my dining companion only saw two options - loving it and not getting it - was a little ridiculous. A little annoyed, I wrote back to assure him that I could handle Shang, and he agreed to stick with the plan.

Shang was not a place I'd been dying to try on my own. The menu looked too expensive, too fusiony, too pan-Asian. But after emailing back and forth with Chris for two weeks, I had actually gotten pretty excited for it, because Chris, like Susur Lee, hails from Toronto. As I would learn over the course of the evening, Chris is a total Susur Lee fanboy and also happens to be a restaurant consultant. I thought it'd be interesting to get an insider's perspective on a controversial place.

Yet for all the gushing Chris did - "I've been following Susur's food for years." "The servers at his restaurants have to be so knowledgeable, otherwise they don't last long. I usually don't even order. I just tell them to feed me." "The kitchen's just not the same when he's not around." - he didn't do much emoting over the food. I can only talk about how I felt about the food because I have no idea whether it lived up to his expectations.

I think he might have been annoyed by the fact that Angela and I ordered from the menu rather leaving it up to our server to decide. Maybe he was also a teensy bit crushed that there was no Susur sighting: "I wonder where he is, you'll usually see him walking around six or seven times a night."

Anyways, I thought the food was pretty good.

Starters:


Curry beef and taro puffs with horseradish cream, octopus salad with tomatillo salsa and pennywort relish


The famous 18-ingredient Singapore Slaw


Singapore Slaw being slawed.

The puffs were a little heavy, the slaw good but for all the hype, still just a slaw (the secret ingredient out of 18 is raw Chinese cellophane noodles giving an unexpected crunch.) The octopus was the most intriguing dish to me - the slices seemed bonded together, but I couldn't figure out how, and the salsa and relish gave complementary spicy zings.

At this point, conversation naturally turned to "the industry," and while Chris was definitely knowledgeable, he also seemed jaded. Maybe it's the nature of his job, but he sounded passionless as he talked about the business, with emphasis on business.

"I think you'd have to be psychotic to open a restaurant in New York."

Gee, buddy, thanks for crapping on my dreams

So a couple of minutes later, when he asked me what type of restaurant I wanted to open, I hesitated, not wanting to seem psychotic nor just incredibly naive.

"A place that serves northern Chinese brunch."
"What's that?"

He was gracious in reserving judgment and polite in trying to understand just what I was talking about (I was pretty bad at explaining the concept), but I wondered how much he really knew about Chinese food.

"I think a lot of Chinese people have Susur's food because they expect it to be classical Chinese," he'd stated earlier. Angela and I had respectfully disagreed.
"Well, maybe that'd be true for our parents, but at our generation, we're pretty open-minded." This is not the first time we've seen fusion.

And it soon became apparent, as the entrees arrived, that this particular brand of fusion was not particularly hard to "get."


Caramelized sablefish, mustard green relish, miso mustard, salmon caviar



Mongolian lamb chops, glazed bananas, chili mint, carrot cardamom chutney


Szechuan half-duck, served with mantou bread, slivered beets, slivered scallions, and bean paste.

How far did it diverge from Chinese food and how well-conceived were the innovations?

Well, we'll skip the sablefish - I'd never had sablefish before and thus have no point of reference (Chinese cuisine also doesn't do this bullshit fish fillet thing). I will say that it had a very unique texture, each groove of muscle separating and feeling like an individual entity. Angela liked the texture, I'm meh.

The lamb chops were my favorite, even though I would've preferred a little more cooking time, but again, the reference here is not Chinese. "Chili mint" is a smoother version of the mint chutney Indian restaurants dole out in cupfuls. The other sauce was a carrot puree, and there were some slices of sweet plantain in the middle (huh?).

So that leaves the duck and mantou bread. The duck's trappings, except for the addition of slivered beets and swapping of mantou for flour pancakes, are exactly the trappings of classic Peking duck, arguably the Chinese national dish. I couldn't taste the beets and the mantou bread was too thick to be a good wrapper for the duck. I still have leftover pieces sitting in a takeout box. The duck itself was very bland, very fatty, and the skin was NOT CRISPY. Not saying that it should have been crispy, but if you're riffing on something that has been pretty much perfected, your alternative has to be all the more ingenious. I also don't see how these alterations make it Szechuan duck all of a sudden - not a hint of Szechuan spice in the dish.

The mantou bread straight-up pissed me off. Mantou in China is big, white, fluffy - the perfect sopper-upper of sauces and juices. Mantou is so beloved that when my grandmother came to visit, she smuggled two huge fresh mantou through customs for Dad. Shang's mantou was small, tough, pre-sliced, and made out of whole wheat.

Good God, even David Chang knows not to fuck (much) with mantou.

In any case, the food on its own would have been more than good enough to leave me satisfied, but with all of Chris's hype, I was underwhelmed. My suspicions about his (lack of) knowledge about Chinese food were confirmed when he revealed that he had never had Peking duck or knew what mantou was. You can't overly credit someone for changing the classics when you've never even had the classics. And you can't fault someone for not liking the innovations when they're just not as good as the classics.



I got this dessert because our waitress uttered the words "sparkling lemongrass, lychee..." and I stopped listening. Had to have it. (It also turns out to have mint and candied lemon.) I think it sums up Shang very well - great concepts executed in pretty, slick, and sometimes even solidly delicious ways, but ultimately not much depth and definitely not mind-blowing. All I tasted in this dish was lemon sorbet, although serving sorbet in a little puddle of fizzy liquid is a great party trick.

While we were eating, by the way, the restaurant had filled up, and at one point I realized I couldn't tell the hostesses from the female customers, as they were equally svelte and equally attired in itty bitty clubbing dresses. This place is far too trendy. I hate trendy.



Angela's dessert was more accomplished: an orange granite with fresh berries and lemon curd, capped with an adorable toasted-crepe cone. In the front is a slice of blood orange sorbet, with chocolate "seeds."

After three and a half loooong hours, we finally wrapped up the meal and took off. By this time I was antsy and could tell Angela was equally bored. It wasn't that the conversation ever stopped, the three of us just didn't...click. The conversation never moved past the stage of asking lots of questions about one another to develop a rhythm of its own. Unfortunately, when conversations can't sustain themselves, three and a half hours can seem really, really long, no matter how enjoyable the food.

One thing we all agreed on was that New York has too many great cheap restaurants for anyone to feel like they need to blow money to eat well. I'd venture to take that a step further and say one shouldn't feel compelled to drop a lot of dime at Shang, at least not more than once. Chinese cuisine outside of China seriously needs a makeover, and Shang is succeeding in making Chinese food a sexy destination for once. I couldn't be happier about that. But to me, it tasted like a flash in the pan.

Mikey@Nooch

“There’s only one-hour parking around here, let’s go to SoHo.”

On the way to meet Mikey at the Starbucks on 9th and 2nd, I had told myself, “Don’t get into a car, don’t get into a car. Honestly, how dumb would that be? Don’t get into a stranger’s car.”

But how was I supposed to say no? I was the one who suggest Pho Sure on Christopher Street after we’d already made plans to meet on the East Side. And I couldn’t ditch the guy who drove all the way from Long Island for having the perfectly reasonable problem of not being able to abandon his car.

I got into the car.

“Damn that’s a big bag,” he gestured as I wedged my Mary Poppins against my knees.
“Yeah, I hope you’re not trying to kidnap me, because I have a Taser in there.”
He laughed easily. “I believe it.”

I think he noticed I was a little nervous, and kept up a steady patter of conversation. My paranoid mind wondered if he was just tying to distract me.

But I loosened up since he was so easy to talk to – a thickly accented, freely cussing type. And he seemed to think the same of me:

“I love the fact that you swear, none of my girl friends swear.”
“Really? I don’t know anyone who doesn’t swear. And I don’t think I swear that much…”
“Oh, you do, you’ve said ‘fuck’ about five times. It’s great, ‘cause you’re like this cute little Asian girl with a total potty mouth.”

Yeah, I’m fuckin’ adorable.

We ended up circling the restaurant for ages, looking for parking. I don’t know what he was smoking, thinking it’d be easy to find parking in SoHo on a Friday night. Eventually, we just gave up and went to Nooch instead.

The selection of Nooch says a lot about Mikey, in the limited capacity that I now know him:
1) We decided to go there in passing, as we were driving up to Koreatown.
2) He found the place much the same way – stopping in on a whim
3) “The food’s pretty good. Not the best restaurant in the world, but okay. Any place I take you is going to be okay.”

He’s the only person in recent memory who has made the word “okay” sound like a positive in conjunction with food. I like that. He was laid-back, more in search of the act of searching than some ultimately sublime food experience.

So, Mikey was great. Nooch, on the other hand, was everything I’m suspicious of in a restaurant – overly designed, hip (with questionable success), having a nonsensical name that sounds like it should be dirty, and a pan-Asian menu.

And God, can we talk about GeishaFace for second? Nooch has some Asian girl’s dolled-up face in the window alluring passerby, but while not all manifestations of GeishaFace are this literal, it is quite a pervasive transgression.


Mikey in front of Noochy GeishaFace

Other perpetrators of GeishaFace: Tao, Suzie Wong, Geisha House, and um, every place where naked girl sushi is served.

[Memo to these tasteless restaurateurs: GeishaFace is sooooo ‘90s. It’s like restaurant equivalent of Chinese-character tattoos. Hire a real chef and stop culture-fucking me and my sisters to sell your mediocre food.]

But Mikey was right; it was okay for a restaurant with a dj booth in the middle of the room. Well, the summer rolls were terrible, but my crispy duck was surprisingly good and surprisingly generous. I had a bite of Mikey’s pad see ew, which was tasty if a bit too dark and too sweet.




"I don't do much," Mikey said toward the end of the evening. "Eat. Drink. Shop. That's all I do. That's it." A guy with simple pleasures.

I'll take his cue: the food was okay, and the company relaxed. Good times.

"You're pretty cool," he pronounced on the way back to the car. Thanks buddy, you're pretty cool too. I'd get into a car with you again.

Calendar

I've been so busy at work this week, I keep flaking and reflaking on my strangerdates. It's now gotten so confusing that I need to keep track of this somehow:

Tonight: Michael @ TBA
Tomorrow: BBQ@Coworkers', then either Ashish@TBA or Christopher@Shang or TBA
Sunday: David@Sripraphai
Tuesday: Angela and co@Matsugen
Wednesday: TM@Baoguette

I already have a couple of backed up blog entries to write, where is the time??

Things I'm Pondering Today:

1) Why are shellfish so irretrievably linked with summertime when true seafood lovers know that you're only supposed to eat shellfish in months ending in "er?" I propose a winter raw bar revolution.

2) Why doesn't Indian food (in the US, because I've never eaten it anywhere else) have more seafood? India has like, 49583493 miles of coastline, yet I don't think I've ever seen a seafood dish at an Indian restaurant. Is this another sad case of regional homogenization and Western acclimatization? (See also: Chinese, Mexican)

3) Why must a lobster roll have mayo? Couldn't they all come with hot butter?

Community Service Announcement

For New Yorkers, born and bussed:

If you're not reading Eater already, or at least just the Dealfeed portion, you really should be. If you still have a job, one upside to the recession is that tons of restaurant meals are now affordable thanks to special deals that will die as the Dow surges*. If you don't have a job anymore, one upside to the recession is that tons of restaurants are offering discounts and deals to those who can prove they're unemployed (Dear John from your previous employer or unemployment check will do).

If it wasn't good enough that someone else was diligently tracking these deals (some of which are admittedly only "deals"), it's like this magical someone else read my mind re: making a map of NYC restaurants and rolled out the Dealfeed Map!

Any takers for Craft's Frugal Fridays (which are now actually every night except Tuesday)?


*Of course, many of these deals might also die if the Dow plunges - along with the restaurants themselves.

Sunday Funday@Mitsuwa

I made the pilgrimage to Mitsuwa, and emerged slightly shell-shocked. I'm now officially auditioning a side role for Japanese Supermarket Buddy - an infinitely patient and food-loving Japanese person (or expat) who can explain, in detail, what the weird and wonderful items in that store are used for. Or just are, as in nature of existence. When I had trouble, I tried to make it a game: in the "sake snacks" aisle I did my best to pick up three bags of completely unidentifiable edibles. Plant, land animal, or sea animal remains to be determined.

For now, Google is my Japanese Supermarket Buddy. Thanks to the big G, I've been able to identify these mystery leaves:



When I saw them, so reverently packaged, I knew they had to be important. They are none other than whole shiso leaves!

Other clearly-marked things that were no less exciting:


I'd never seen fresh whole wasabi root before. It's like knowing what tigers look like from movies and books and then seeing one at the zoo for the first time: no touching allowed, and it's probably being really boring, but you gotta take a snap!



Mmmm bluefin o-toro. Seems wildly expensive until you remember how much it costs at a restaurant.


The takeout sushi counter to put all others to shame.

The whole time I was at Mitsuwa, I wished people were waiting for me at home, docilely opening their mouths upon my return to ingest my findings like little baby birds. No such luck. I left with meager loot including furikake for making tamago gohan.

And then.

And then I went to the food court. My North Bergen-bred friend Angela, who is the only other person I know who is just as obsessed with food as I am, had raved that the Mitsuwa food court had the best udon outside of Japan.



She wasn't wrong. She never is, unless you count the time my team beat hers in our school's Iron Chef competition, Battle Alligator (HA!).

I slurped it down as shoppers swirled around me, some giving quizzical (families) or scornful (teenagers) looks to the lone girl buried in her udon. Whatever y'all. More than one boyfriend has made fun of the way I wander aimlessly through supermarkets, eyes transfixed on everything but where my cart or myself are going. More than one boyfriend has subsequently gotten annoyed at me for taking too long after tiring of making fun.

Some people like dining alone, others like going to the movies alone. I prefer grocery shopping alone.