Me So Hung Ry...Not

In the food world, it seems like there is a fine line between having a philosophy and taking yourself too seriously, and another between trying something new and deploying a marketing gimmick. I am constantly trying to parse restaurants along these axes, obsessed with divining the ingredients of success and failure.

When it comes to Chinese restaurants, I am especially obsessed. I feel that ours is a cuisine equal to if not greater than France or Japan's, yet in the United States, Chinese food is pitifully relegated to the lowest rung within the already-peripheral bucket of "ethnic food." We are known for inventing delivery and keeping the MSG market afloat; for tacky menus (accumulating on the floor) and unnaturally glistening stock photos; for cockroaches and grease traps; for corn starch and brown sauce; for names containing the words "garden," "palace," and "imperial" in Wonton font.

So, I think constantly about what makes a good Chinese restaurant because I want nothing short of a complete Chinese food renaissance: high-quality, value-oriented, and accessible. Where are our bistros and brasseries, izakayas and trattorias? People - it was really hard to resist saying "comrades" - we can do better than this bullshit:


So, after reading glowing reviews practically everywhere, I was pretty interested in trying Hung Ry, the new hand-pulled noodle shop on Bond St. I convinced a skeptical Eddie Huang to come along...and all I really ate for dinner was crow.

I should have known that buying Chinatown talent and putting it in Limoges china falls squarely on the wrong side of every fine line.

Certainly, the name is already enough to merit a side-eye. When Eddie tries to work that kind of humor, Racialicious writes a whole post unpacking it, and he’s Asian! Then there was the admission that whiteboy couldn’t learn how to make the noodles himself. Ok, maybe that’s a smart move, maybe even humble, but again, if you’re going to move hand-pulled noodles to NoHo and charge me $18 a bowl (and dammit the actual Chinese guy in this operation, the one actually making your noodles - he better be a partner), you should at least pick up your end of the slack!

Because the noodles themselves were great: masterfully chewy, springy, delightful. Apparently in NYC, this and a foodie-baiting menu (OXTAIL! LIVER! MARROW!) are enough to earn accolades from NYM, NYT, Village Voice, and even Lucky Rice. But noodles alone can’t carry a noodle soup. The broth part of this partnership had no smell, no taste, and no body; everything tasted so flat I dumped a ton of house-made chili sauce into my bowl, and then it just tasted flat and spicy. Then again, you have to stink up the air to make a decent bone broth, and that probably doesn’t fly if you’re trying to do the sexy NoHo open-kitchen thing.

Maybe it was an off night. I only went once.

Still, the bigger problem for me was conceptual. Why would anyone float giant gobs of bone marrow in broth? I didn't think I could not love bone marrow, but it turns out I don’t love eating nuggets of slimy, flavorless fat, which is what the product had been reduced to by such uninspired treatment. So I left them floating there, the sad, misguided marshmallows, which of course hurt my Chinese heart.
Aiya, this is so un-Chinese!

I hate thinking that. Like I said, I get excited when people color outside the lines. I don't even believe in authenticity, because all cuisines are dynamic. But I guess I do believe in staying true to the spirit of things, in sound philosophy. Chinese food, like all great cuisines, is about balance. No discordant ingredients, no spiky flavors. This is not so much dogma as plain logic: cooking is synthesis.
In the end, only the New Yorker got it right by my book:

“If you like your macaroni and cheese drizzled with truffle oil, your French fries fried in duck fat, and foie gras in your banh mi, you might make a beeline for Hung Ry"

Hung Ry is a gilded lily that will smell sweet to a certain type of foodie. But it ain't me.

Tang

Half of my receipts from Xi'an Famous Foods and my old, old laptop.

I've become a regular at the St. Marks location of Xi'an Famous Foods since its opening two weeks ago. My dad is from Xi'an, and I was always begging for lamb growing up even though my mom, the cook in the family, hated the smell of it.

I was one of the pilgrims who trekked to Flushing regularly just to get a fix of lamb noodles down in Golden Mall's stuffy basement cafeteria. Liang Pi, the proprietor, was always there - bossy, sweaty, genial. After Anthony Bourdain featured Xi'an Famous on his Outer Boroughs episode of No Reservations, I could be heard loudly bitching about the descending hordes of white foodies, but secretly, I was so proud to see a Chinese immigrant restaurateur make it big.

And I sure as hell was happy to hear they were coming to the East Village. I announced to all my friends that there was pretty much no point in me eating anywhere else, and as you can see from the receipts above, I wasn't kidding.

The first night I went, they were selling an unidentified orange drink in those plastic boba cups sealed with little anime characters. People kept asking what it was, and General Manager Jason Wang, Liang Pi's son, kept saying in this gently exasperated tone, "I don't know, it's something my dad made." I bought one, thinking it was probably some weird/tasty Chinese beverage.

It was Tang.

No doubt about it. The same Tang of those obnoxious orangutan commercials you saw during after-school commercials, Tang of the sweet and chemical tang. I thought I'd been hosed like a roundeye until Gaby sent me this essay by novelist Yiyun Li. She writes,

The year I turned 16, a new product caught my eye. Fruit Treasure, as Tang was named for the Chinese market, instantly won everyone's heart. Imagine real oranges condensed into a fine powder! Equally seductive was the TV commercial, which gave us a glimpse of a life that most families, including mine, could hardly afford...Even though Tang was the most expensive fruit drink available, its sales soared. A simple bottle cost 17 yuan, a month's worth of lunch money. A boxed set of two became a status hostess gift. Even the sturdy glass containers that the powder came in were coveted. People used them as tea mugs, the orange label still on, a sign that you could afford the modern American drink. Even my mother had an empty Tang bottle with a snug orange nylon net over it, a present from one of her fellow schoolteachers. She carried it from the office to the classroom and back again as if our family had also consumed a full bottle.

Yiyun Li was born in 1972, making her younger than Liang Pi, but I want to make this exotic Tang narrative fit. I want it to fit because it's the kind of American Dream story I'm still sentimental for (even though my progressive education says I'm not supposed to be). I picture Liang Pi carefully mixing Tang and sealing each cup, preparing to open his shiny new East Village restaurant over Fourth of July weekend. His son Jason, 22, college-educated, and bilingual like me, is not in the picture. Kids like us don't associate Tang with a better life, we associate it with surfing orangutans.

The truth was, our family had never tasted Tang. Just think of how many oranges we could buy with the money spent on a bottle, my father reasoned. His resistance sent me into a long adolescent melancholy. I was ashamed by our lack of style and our life, with its taste of orange-peel water. I could not wait until I grew up and could have my own Tang-filled life.

The Tangy scenario I've imagined feels like the time I watched my dad lug home a case of red wine from a community center wine-tasting class. "Can you taste the butter?" he asked, frowning and sipping, "They said it tastes a little bit like butter, can you taste it?" Children are selfish when it comes to our parents - I don't think we allow them to have fully realized identities, they're just our parents! But this was a rare moment when I saw Dad's life in context: the Cabernet was an achievement, a hard journey ending in a wine-filled, middle-class, American life. And it killed me that he couldn't taste the fucking butter notes.

I had not thought about the boy much until I moved to America 10 years later and discovered Tang in a grocery store. It was just how I remembered it - fine powder in a sturdy bottle - but its glamour had lost its gloss because, alas, it was neither expensive nor trendy. To think that all the dreams of my youth were once contained in this commercial drink!

I hope Liang Pi never realized Tang was just another cheap powdered beverage occupying shelf space between Country Time and Kool-Aid. I hope when he decided to sell Tang, he thought he was giving his customers the best America had to offer.

There was no Tang in the minifridge when I went to Xi'an Famous tonight.
"Did you guys stop selling Tang?" I asked Jason.
"Yeah, it was just something random my Dad did. Why? Did you like it?"
"Yeah, I did. I really did."
"Well, you're definitely the only one. But I'll tell him you liked it."
"Good."

I have a Pepsi with my lamb face salad.

Tip of the Hat/Wag of the Finger

I took the winter off due to time and money constraints, and also because it was exhausting and sometimes boring to eat with strangers all the time. Many things have germinated quietly during the cold months, and I've figured out my next steps, career-wise, as well as a few other projects I want to do, food-wise. Strictly Platonic will probably not be the same blog ever again, but I have too many thoughts to suppress, so I guess I'll write other food-related things here until a better platform emerges.

In the Colbert style, I present two things today in the Tip of the Hat/Wag of the Finger format:

First up, Tip of the Hat to Eddie Huang of Baohaus. Have y'all heard of Baohaus? It's the new gua bao joint that's taken the NYC food scene by storm lately. I haven't been yet, and, being a chink of the uncouth mainlander variety, I've never even had a gua bao in my life. Nevertheless, I've been following Eddie Huang on his blog and I'm digging a lot of what he has to say. Two posts in particular sum up my own feelings on fusion and Chinese immigrant restauranteering.

Every food lover seems to have an opinion of fusion, but when I come across a fusion-y menu item, my question is how they got the idea to put galangal in the beef wellington (not really, that would be gross, but you get the idea). By my reckoning, "fusion" cuisine is the best in the world. Vietnamese cuisine is fusion. Creole is fusion. Pretty much every cuisine in the world is some degree "fusion." The difference in heart (and taste) is that great fusion comes from resourceful people working with what they have in a foreign setting; it comes from diaspora, not some kid out of cooking school with a bag of tricks but no sense of place. Authenticity is not about sticking to a recipe, it's about having a sense of place.

In that way, Eddie Huang and his Baohaus very much "emspiritfy" the type of restaurant I might open someday. I was talking to my friend, the talented Gabriela, about why there's no good Mexican food and very little good Chinese food in Manhattan. In a grander sense, we were also talking about why Mexican food and Chinese food belong in the "cheap ethnic" box rather than "haute ethnic" box (think Japanese food) in the mind of the average white American yuppie foodie.

"The good stuff still lives on in enclaves, serving their own communities," I remarked, "tacos on 116th, Chinese places in Flushing. All places with no real menus, no real ambiance, no English speaking staff, much less any kind of PR strategy. And how many immigrant restauranteurs can afford the overhead in hip Manhattan neighborhoods anyway?"
"Who's going to serve authentic food but make it better, more accessible, then?"
"People like us, I guess. English-speaking, college-educated, social media-savvy."

Eddie seems to be successful because he's done exactly that: kept the authenticity, amped up the quality, and gave it both foodie cred and a dynamic personality. (The words "Niman Ranch" go a long way toward accomplishing two of the above.) So props to him, I'll be interested to see what he does next.

~~~

Next up, Wag of the Finger to Andrea Scotting, who posted this jaw-dropper on The Atlantic today. Here's a test: how many words of that article can you read without rolling your eyes? My eyes met heaven after ten, but let's be honest, the title had me suspicious from the get-go.

Aside from the disturbingly flippant Afghanistan/Haiti allusions, by far the most vapid quote was this one: "But I clearly have a nagging, deep-seated case of something that makes me frame everything in life through food."

Lady, that frame is called privilege, which is clearly something you've never paused to consider very deeply. This is abundantly clear by the lame attempt to claim "equal opportunity" food racism because you also get distracted by New England wasps and their lobster rolls. I agree on one thing: racist is not the right term for you because you can't be racist toward white people. A New England wasp, you see, has never been made to feel Other because of his lobster roll. This is like when Madonna wears a bindi, it's fashion; when an Indian woman wears a bindi, it's foreign.

For you, this must be difficult to understand, because you seem to treat the people of color who provide goods and services in your life like your personal recipe dispensers. I'm sorry, but it's pretty fucking offensive that "dal" lights up in your head every time you see an Indian person. God forbid that person be allowed to exist beyond connoting a foodstuff. Even if it's not true for you, a contributor to The Atlantic who hopefully wrote your article tongue-in-cheek, a lot of people do associate
ChineseAsian people with fried rice/chicken wings/MSG and little else (case in point).

As a person of color, I've come to see food both as a boon and a bane. While it does allow people to connect (and I'm sure that's what you thought you were doing with that call-center employee), boiling people of color down to the bite-sized pieces of their respective cultures happens all too often at the expense of acknowledging the ongoing struggles of the people themselves. Conservatives and liberals alike get to say "look how multicultural we are, all gathered together eating bibimbap," while disenfranchisement and xenophobia remain unchallenged.

And no, cutting a check to the Red Cross does not mean your work is done: if you're going to commoditize, consume, appropriate, "discover," or denounce the commoditizable, consumable, appropriatable, discoverable, and denounceable parts of someone else's culture - most often the foods - at least grapple with the truth that it's because you are white and wealthy that you get to look at the world around you as a smorgasbord.* This is your frame, and you're lucky to have it.

Addendum: Oh good, I'm not the only one who's appalled.
Addendum 2: I read back over some old entries and realized that I've basically said all this before, but in a nicer way.

*You also have to get comfortable with your privilege, because you're not a bad person and at the end of the day, it's ok to keep eating that bibimbap. You can even sing Kumbayaa if you'd like. You just can't write pithy articles about "food racism," because that shit is dumb and pisses me off.

Calling the Tribe with Alex@Congee Village

I met Alex of the eponymous AlexEatsWorld at an open house for an apartment in East Village, where the owner/roommate described the living situation as his "happy dictatorship." The place had a 360-degree terrace, but neither of us took the room.

A month later, I got an email from Alex, who'd come across this blog on The Feedbag during my July 4th shenanigans. "Can't believe food didn't come up with two huge foodies in that room," he said, "let's grab food sometime."

Emails flew, Lists were exchanged, Asianness ensued. Congee Village. I'd never been, but I recognize superior judgment when I see it - the dude has a real domain name and some sweet photos.

A time was set: 7:30 on a Saturday. I got there five minutes earlier than he did, and in those five minutes, my eyes and stomach took in that epic menu and grew bigger and bigger.


Bamboo+Christmas lights=lovely kitsch

"We have a problem," I said when he showed up, "we need more people."

An ex of mine from Montana once spoke of Native American kids at his high school "calling on the tribe" when they needed help. A phone call would be made and like a snow chain, all the other kids with Native American ancestry would show up. Because it was high school, this generally happened when there were honors to defend, vengeance to be enacted.

Well, I'd like a tribe of Asians to show up whenever I need help eating. At Congee Village, ordering for one, or two, or even three people is just sad. Good thing we had time. People were spilling out the doors - Asian families, white teenagers, Hong Kong International School alumni there for a reunion, Asian goths...Asian goths??? The wait was at least 30 minutes, during which Alex proved much more successful at rallying reinforcements than I. Just as we were sat, his two friends, also Asian, male, showed up. Good men.

By this time I had - no joke - gone through a takeout menu and underlined everything I wanted. Alex was at first amused, and then alarmed when it became apparent that I was serious about "but we can just take it home after!"

Some serious editing - crossing out, circling, compromise - later, we settled on six dishes. Sacrificing the 7th, a soup, was really hard.


I broke my rule against ordering chicken for this, the house special chicken. See those fried garlic chips? Mmmm.

Over dinner, we talked about the Motherland. Specifically, foods of. We were birds of a feather - ABC (that's American-born Chinese to you) twenty-somethings with vaguely impressive American educations/careers and love for Asian cuisines. As a mixed group of Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Mainlanders - and Twinkies all - this feast was none of ours and all of ours.

To wit: Alex, who is a Yelp Elite member, mentioned an upcoming event at Water Taxi Beach for other Elites, and we got into a debate over Yelp.

"I hate Yelp," Kevin said, launching into a monologue that could have come from my mouth, "I was at Shanghai Cafe the other day, and this white dude and his son sit down behind me. They order fried rice, and I roll my eyes, and then they order the soup dumplings and I think OK, fine. When they get the dumplings, they don't know how to eat them, so they take their chopsticks and poke holes all over the dumplings to cool them, and all the juice runs out. They're probably going to go home and write a Yelp review being all 'I don't see what the big deal is.' I was like, get the fuck out of my restaurant."

We murmured sympathetically - we all get a little possessive sometimes.


Tofu and many different kinds of mushrooms. A little heavy on the cornstarch for my taste.

I asked Alex where he ended up moving, and he said Murray Hill, because the East Village was just got too small and too dirty for him after living on 4th and 1st for a while.

"But the food," I sighed, "how can you leave the fooooood??"


Sauteed pea shoots - my favorite. I could eat plates and plates of these.

These boys knew my hood, though. It's nice meeting three strangers at the same time - you get to have livelier discussions. When I told them I was doing the East Village ramen thing, they all professed allegiance to Minca. Minca was the first real ramen I ever had, and it was truly unctuous. Japanese has always seemed like the prissy, sanitized Asian brother to me: insanely delicious, sure, but hitting a more refined craving than pho/pad see ew/roast-duck-on-rice. Then I had ramen, and I knew I had been wrong. All the ramen shops tout ramen as Japan's soul food; I don't know if that's true, or even claimable, but it certainly hit a sweet spot with me.

"But what about Ippudo?" I asked, in the interest of fairness.
"I don't know...I just don't like the texture of their noodles," one of the boys said. The other two agreed.
"What's wrong with them? Undercooked?"
"No, I like them al dente. They were just too starchy. The broth is good, but it's a lighter broth than Minca's, and it doesn't come with a lot of crap in it." Clearly, crap is good.
"I like anything with pork belly on it," said Kevin, "they give you three huge slices at Minca." It's hard to argue against pork belly. I, having never been to Ippudo, find myself swayed by their opinions.


Bamboo rice with Chinese sausage

The first time I had this dish, it was on top of the famous "dragon back" rice paddies in Guilin, China. It was cooked and served in real bamboo, longer and thinner than this. The bamboo was simply split down the middle and stuffed with rice. After scooping out what you could, you had to scrape for the bits that stuck crispily to the insides of the bamboo. Needless to say, this version could not compare, and I don't hold that against it. Chinese sausage is magic.


If you've noticed that the pictures suck less this time, it's because Alex did the honors on my little Canon point-n-shoot.

Salt and pepper squid is the standard by which I judge Cantonese restaurants. Congee Village's portion was generous, but I wish it came with the usual mound of jalapenos and shredded lettuce infused with peppery squidy flavor - it makes such an awesome topping for rice.


Feast. The sixth dish was beef in a sizzling pan with onions. I had no interest in it. It seemed very...TGI Friday's

We cleaned. It. Up.

Halfway through our meal, a group of older Chinese people sat down at the table next to ours, and I became obsessed with what they were having. Everything looked incredible. Huge Dungeness crab, a tureen of drunken shrimp. All of a sudden, I felt like the white people who had ordered the fried rice at Shanghai Cafe. Schooled.

"Can we get the crab, pleeeeeasse?" I pleaded the horrified boys, who were leaning back in their chairs and taking deep breaths.
"Uhh, maybe next time."

I hope so. Alex and I made indefinite plans to hit up Mara's Homemade for Cajun food. I hope he winds up calling the tribe again.

For all my fellow office drones in Midtown East.

I went to the opening of Mantao Chinese Sandwiches for lunch today. I just couldn't resist after receiving a "friends of Mantao" soft opening invite email with secret 20% discount password. I need to feel special.

But the line was out the door and after waiting 5 or so minutes to place my order, I waited another 25 for my food. So much for feeling special.

"We're a little backed up," the adorable girl working the register was telling everyone, "it'll be 15-20 minutes."

(Before eating anything, I was already utterly charmed by this operation, just because they seemed like a bunch of friends who decided to open a sandwich shop (you can make a lot of assumptions observations in 25 minutes). In another life, where my friends are not studying to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, curators, writers, professors, and rich finance dudes, I can see us doing something like this.)

I got the Original Mantao Pork Bun sandwich and the Short Rib and Kimchi sandwich, although everything on the menu looked yummy.


Short rib and kimchi. Think bulgogi rather than kalbi for the short rib here, but a lesser marination job than either.


Original pork bun. I should be a hand model.


I'm not saying I measured, but they are about 9cm in diameter.

Both were solid, although the pork bun was the clear winner for me. I especially like what they've done with the bun. Mantou bread is traditionally steamed and eaten whole, as an accompaniment to veggie and meat dishes. Northern Chinese sandwiches, on the other hand, are usually made with flat, sesame-adorned, pancake-type breads. This, a steamed mantou toasted with sesame, is a happy, wholesome marriage better than anything that bougie fusion places like Shang have come up with.

I also got the milky black tea, but that was weak - too much milk.

I'll be dragging my coworkers there tomorrow to order the fried egg with Chinese sausage, spicy pork, and spicy mackerel sandwiches. If you decide to go this week, I highly recommend placing a pickup order via telephone and adding 5 minutes to the wait time they quote you.

A different kind of indulgence

I've been having a lot of nice meals lately, but sometimes, this is all I want:


scallion pancakes, $2.95


chicken wings, $2.95

Both from Empire Corner, the takeout place near my apartment. The long-gone Chinese restaurant in Cambridge where my dad worked as a delivery man was called Empire. Fitting, no?

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.

Feaster Sunday@Claire's Apartment

My favorite Christians are the once-a-year ones. My friend Claire, wanting to do her first Easter in NYC right, made vague promises of egg-dying at her place in Williamsburg. She didn't ask anyone to bring anything, but we all somehow knew to show up with yummy tidbits and soon we had a Feaster. Jesus has risen indeed.

I always use visits to Claire as a convenient excuse to stop in the Union Square area to buy things for eating or for wearing. This time, I made a beeline for Momofuku Milk Bar.

I don't really like baked goods, or sweets in general, but when I see something like Chinese sausage* focaccia or green curry banana bread, I have to try it. Asians don't bake, so Asian ingredients+yeast+heat is mindblowing to me. Also, AZN pride and stuff.


Chinese sausage focaccia


Green curry banana bread

I also got the pork buns for good measure. People think David Chang is a genius for the pork bun, but I think it seriously needs scallion (the menu says it's supposed to have scallions, but mine did not).

My mother would have keeled over if she'd seen me pay $9 for two tiny pork buns. Therefore, Chang is not a genius for creating this pork bun (nothing in there is particularly new), he is a genius for making basic Chinese ingredients sexy to white people. I don't mean that as either criticism or dismissal; after all, I plan on doing the same and only resent him for getting there before me.



Nevertheless, I got nothing but love for the way the grease ran down my arm.


Small girl, smaller bun, big fatty

The focaccia was good but I wish it had been fuller, crazier. Why stop at sausage? Throw some tea eggs in there! Bits of browned guotie rice! In the end we were trying to figure out how to divvy up the last piece according to where the two last morsels of sausage were buried.

Conversation at one point turned to food neuroses, like how there are people who only eat white colored foods (ask me about this sometime and I'll make like Freud and expound.) Claire and Janelle wanted me to blog a week of eating nothing but green foods. I decided green curry is the only way I'd survive such a sentence. I'd put it in everything, because this banana bread has proven you can:


I regret not getting the kimchi butter to go with this.

I can't be the only one with a face-stuffing pic:




Notice the mountain of individually-wrapped croissants in the back. They did not go unloved.

Eventually we got around to dyeing eggs. Craftmaster Claire found a method that involved wrapping silk ties (or scarves) around the eggs and boiling them so that the pattern from the ties transfers onto the shells.

How cool is this?!



Why would you dye eggs any other way?

Hope everyone's Easters were just as awesome. I decided to go to Casa Mono with StephenB tomorrow night after all. It was kind of a done deal after peeking at the menu, but none of y'all tried to dissuade me anyway. Your collective fault if I get creeped on. Stay tuned.



*Officially making a list of overlooked foods that I will singlehandedly popularize someday. Considering American highbrow obsession with salumi/charcuterie, it's only a matter of time before Chinese sausage gets its moment in the sun. I'll be there to see it happen, my porky pretty.

Coworkers@Joe's Shanghai (Midtown)

I had a devastating late-week craving for soup dumplings, so I dragged my coworkers to Joe's Shanghai for dinner on Friday.

We kept it simple:



Four orders of pork, two orders of crab and pork. Being from Nanjing, four hours away from Shanghai, I've been eating soup dumplings since birth, so I will now stop calling them by this bullshit name. Xiao long bao is what they are.


Alex demonstrates the correct way to eat xiaolongbao.

Did it stack up to the xiao long bao of my childhood? Of the touristy Nan Xiang in Shanghai or Din Tai Fung in Hong Kong? Eeeehhhh, what's the point in comparing a xiao long bao with the Platonic Ideal of a xiao long bao, which can only be found in China? Doing so would just make me sad. Suffice to say it is hard not to love a xiao long bao that is done even remotely correctly. I've made many a meal from the frozen supermarket ones.

Joe's Shanghai satisfied my craving. That was enough. The skins were a tiny bit tough and I found the dumplings a little too big - I like them small and dainty so they don't seem like giant meatballs once the soup and wrapper are gone. The boys loved the pork ones and said the crab ones were too salty and "too crabby." I thought both were equally delicious.

My one major gripe was with the service. I do not require much. I even think shitty service in Chinese restaurants is kind of charming, in a perversely authenticating sort of way. But when you give the four people who order six baskets of soup dumplings one tiny little soy sauce dish, and then stingily bring over one more when they ask for more sauce dishes, I get a little insulted. (Listen, I may be sitting with the baiguis, and your other customers may all be tourists, but I will not be taken for a pushover.) Also, your sauce isn't even very good, because it's been sitting around pre-mixed until the ginger goes soggy and tasteless, so really, you can afford to give it up.


Alex enjoys his xiao long bao

We also ordered salt and pepper squid, which is kind of my benchmark dish for judging Chinese restaurants. At $17, it was the most expensive I've ever encountered, and the portion was small. It was a solid fry job, if a bit under-salted. As usual, my favorite part was mixing the jalapeños, scallions, and lettuce bed with rice. Too bad they were even stingier with the peppers than the squid.

The takeaway: go in times of desperation. Be disciplined and just order the xiaolongbao.