Chiu on This

What I drank this week

At the Brandy Library on Tuesday:

• Templeton Rye

At Warren 77 on Wednesday:

• Juan - tequila, cilantro, jalapeno, a little orange juice, and lime juice. The jalapeno and cilantro make the drink.
• West 12th - vodka, mint, cucumber, lemon juice, and club soda. Mint and cucumber, a good combo.
• Hendrick's gimlet. I should have had the Hendrick's on its own, it's such a great gin.

At Ward III last night:

• Hell Bent for Leather - Maker’s 46 Bourbon, Red Breast Irish Whiskey, cardamom, lemon and orange zest Infused sugar cube served with a burnt orange twist
• The Banshee - Glenrothes 1998 single malt scotch, allspice dram, Gran Classico bitter, orange bitters, and a pinch of chai tea. Very good. Too good.

At home, now:

• Seltzer water
• Grapefruit juice
• More seltzer water

Phew!

 

The lunch that never will be

RIP New Chao Chow, my favorite restaurant in Manhattan's Chinatown. My sister and I had planned to go there for lunch last week to fill up on some noodle soups. I'd warned her that the last time I went there, it was closed, but that I couldn't tell if it was a temporary, vacation thing (the sign didn't say much, and there was no city health inspection warning) or something permanent.

Well, it's permanent. And what a shame. I'd been going there over a span of 25 years for Chinese/Thai noodles and iced coffee. I think the first time I went was with my uncle, his wife, his in-laws who were visiting from Bangkok, and my mom. My uncle's in-laws were shopping for a chandelier in the nearby lighting district. After a successful purchase, accomplished by my uncle's mother-in-law, who, without speaking any English but with an astute use of raised eyebrows and other impressive facial expressions, mostly of disdain, was able to negotiate a price to her liking from the salesman, we headed over to Chao Chow for lunch.

Slightly bigger than a hole in the wall and with several communal tables, Chao Chow was usually pretty packed with people dining in or standing in line for take out orders. I don't recall if the group photo of the staff with David Letterman in front of the store was already up there in 1986; whenever I did take notice of it, it just added to my fondness for the place, which always seemed to have the same core wait staff and cooks, with only a few rotations of younger waiters over the years.

I liked Chao Chow so much that I didn't want to tell other people about it or bring them with me. I didn't want to explain what it was that I was eating or ordering; why the addition of condiments like fish sauce, sugar, vinegar, hot sauce of different varieties (green chilies in white vinegar, ground red chilies with garlic), and white pepper was such a fun but frustrating ritual - I could never get the balance of flavors right until I hit the last third of a bowl of noodles, while my mom could get it just right from the get go, and customize it to the different likings of my sister and me (thanks, mom!), and we'd always find this inability comical; why the waiters would look either puzzled, amused, or irritiated that my sister and I always had to ask the same questions before ordering, as if we couldn't remember the simplest things (is that the fat white noodle or the thin one, or the yellow noodle?); or whether this was a Thai place, a Chinese place, or what.

Chao Chow was a place I'd go to with my family and was the repository and backdrop of many fond memories of eating, laughing, and chatting, most likely about food. I'm sorry to see it go, and I hope all the folks who worked there and fed us and put up with us are doing well. I wonder who kept the Letterman photo.

Postscript:

Since we weren't able to eat at Chao Chow, my sister and I met at XO Kitchen nearby. My sister ordered a seafood noodle soup that she declared pretty good. I guess we'll have to be on the lookout for new-to-us places that will live up to our standards.

Curry, not in a hurry*

Curry rice with a karaage (fried chicken) stick and salad

I found myself stuck in the public atrium of at the Citigroup Building at 53rd and Lex on Friday. With a conference call scheduled and me running late, I thought I'd found a fairly quiet place for a phone call. I should have known better; the piano in the atrium should have been the tip off, but I figured it was for show. But less than 5 minutes into the call, the pianist comes out, and I had to scramble all over the place to find a spot of quiet, a space where there's also no place to sit.

After the call wrapped up, I decided I should just grab lunch where I was and perhaps enjoy some of the piano tinklings while I dine. I headed to Kushi-Q, which I thought said Sushi-Q. I had two seconds of disappointment until I saw the menu Japanese curry over rice. I love me some Japanese curry, particularly when it comes with some fatty fried pork; here, I saw as an option karaage, fried chicken on a skewer. I love me some fried chicken, so that was that. A salad with orange and ginger dressing came with.

The curry was pretty good, not as complex as Go Go Curry's, but satisfying and good with the chicken, which was crispy/chewy/tender. The rice-to-curry ratio was far too high, making me feel guilty for tossing out a huge amount of uneaten rice (not sure what other people do in a situation like this - take the stuff with you?). It's a good option for a midtown lunch, although I don't plan on being back in that atrium anytime soon, piano or no.

(*Apologies for the crappy title. I couldn't think of anything interesting AT ALL.)

The bora and the tennis roll

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of hanging out with my friends Nionne and Seth in Richmond Hill / Ozone Park to chomp on Guyanese food, specifically, Guyanese-Chinese and baked goods.

When Nionne, a former colleague, recently posted on Facebook that she was enjoying Ovaltine with tennis rolls with cheese, I was intrigued, trying to imagine, rather than doing an immediate search on the interwebs, what a tennis roll could possibly be. With an ulterior motive in mind - Nionne had taken me to eat Guyanese-Chinese twice before at Hibiscus Restaurant and Bar, and I'd developed an intense liking for their fried rice dishes - I asked her what tennis rolls were, and she offered to take me for a visit to Richmond Hill, hitting up Hibiscus along with a trip to a Guyanese bakery. Yes!

This intersected nicely with some plans I was making for another eating outing with my friend Seth, whom I've known since my college years. Seth has been living in NYC for maybe less than two years and, as a historian, amateur sociologist, and generally inquisitive person (altogether, a smart person who is not a smartypants), has already learned a helluva lot about the city's neighborhoods, peoples, patterns of habitation, and foodways. In short, he's one of the few non-annoying chowhoundy folks I know willing to travel across boroughs for food. We'd been trying to figure out where to eat next (he'd nixed a previous suggestion to try the Iraqi hot dog at a Colombian place in Elmhurst) when the opportunity for Guyanese-Chinese came up. His response when I asked if he'd be up for it was, "Would I be up for it?  WOULD I BE UP FOR IT? I am GEEKED!"

Okay, so with this lengthy preface out of the way and our cast of characters established, here's the food:

My pick: Fried rice with chicken. Magically delicious!

  Seth's pick: Chow mein with lapchong (Chinese sausage)

I didn't take a picture of Nionne's choice - the fried rice with everything (lapchong, shrimp, chicken) - as I think I was already tunnelling into my tower of food. Once again, I can't actually describe or define what made my dish so delicious, or what the specific variation Guyanese contributed to hyphenate the Chinese element of the fried rice. I can say that the chicken, both dark and white meat, was perfectly cooked: a crisp yet slightly chewy skin, that difficult combination of textures to achieve; somehow scarcely a trace of fat or greasiness; and very moist and tender flesh left on the bone. I couldn't identify the sauce drizzled on top of the chicken - not XO sauce or oyster sauce, but something like those yet not as salty and not sweet. Small bits of the green bean-like bora, which I thought looked like Chinese long beans (only to discover while doing some lite background research for this blog that they're - gasp! - actually one and the same vegetable) brought a welcome crunch and slight trace of bitterness and chlorophyll to the rich dish. I highly recommend adding hot pepper sauce, which is similar to this brand of Thai Sriracha hot sauce, to the fried rice and chicken for even more flavor complexity and happiness. (Speaking of Thai hot sauce, I felt like this dish was something my mom and her side of the family would really like, as it does remind me of Thai versions of fried rice, including the slice of cucumber on top.)

After polishing off lunch and wrapping up the leftovers - portion sizes here were enormous - we decided to walk over to Little Guyana Bake Shop to find those tennis rolls, and to aid with digestion. We made a detour to check out Warung Kario, a Surinamese restaurant that's on our to-do / to-eat list; we'll need to do some homework before then, as none of us could translate the menu. The stroll down lively Liberty Avenue on a sunny day, punctuated with stops in grocery and seafood stores to figure out what banga mary fish looks like and how much Ovaltine costs, provided a nice diversion from my impending sense of doom from not having gotten any work done over the weekend.

Once at the bakery, Seth got an super red sweet that looked of Asian Indian provenance, and Nionne picked up some tennis rolls and other items. I mooched a tennis roll off Nionne and bought a bottle of mauby, which I'd never tried before - unfortunately, I didn't develop a liking for mauby, which tasted bark-y (well, it is made from bark), slightly medicinal, a bit too sugary, and bitter; I'm willing to give it another try, as maybe it was the specific formulation/brand of the drink that I didn't enjoy and not the type of drink itself.

As for the tennis roll, even though it didn't come hot out of the oven, it tasted lovely. I'm not a big fan of breads or sweets, so it boded well when my first bit led me to want to continue eating. I had done a slight bit of reading up on tennis rolls so couldn't take credit for identifying the lemon and orange flavors in the bread (from the zest that goes into the batter). The tennis roll reminded me a little bit of Portugese sweet bread, but less dense and less sweet. I ate a few bites but was still too full from lunch; I saved the rest for breakfast the next morning. Slightly toasting it didn't make it any better and detracted from the texture, adding butter was good, but next time I'm going to 1) try it with cheese, as I can see how that'd work nicely and 2) with a little sweetened condensed milk, to be decadent.

Whew! I feel full and happy just reliving this. If anyone wants to replicate this meal, take the A train to Lefferts Boulevard to get to these places, and let me know if you're going so I can join up with you.

Something-hyphen-Chinese

Today's going to be a good eating day. I'm meeting up with Nionne, a former colleague, and Seth, a friend from college, to have Guyanese-Chinese food in Richmond Hills in Queens. One of the best things about living in NYC is the wide range of hyphenated Chinese foods I've got access to.* There's Cuban Chinese, of course; Indian Chinese, a brilliant mash-up of cuisines (I still have to write up something about the fantastic Himalayan Hut in Jackson Heights); Guyanese-Chinese, which I'm so grateful to Nionne for introducing me to, and which I'll write more about in a separate post; and Peruvian-Chinese, which I tried out with Seth and a couple of friends last summer.

My notes from that lunch at Chifa Union in Elmhurst aren't that great, mostly because the blazing heat of that day had melted much of my brain away. I hate Hate HATE hot weather, and I'd had the bad luck of picking one of the hottest days of the year to try out a new restaurant and even worse luck in picking a bad - that is, unnecessarily long - route over broiling, unshaded concrete sidewalks to get there. When I arrived at Chifa Union, I was a disgusting fount of sweat, and only an arctic blast of air conditioning could have cooled me down.

So while I don't have good descriptions or even the right names for the dishes we ate, I can at least share some pictures with you, and give an overall endorsement to Peruvian-Chinese food, which I do plan to try again. (For other reviews, try out this item from Edible Queens and this writeup from Serious Eats.)

I think these are the remnants of Chi jau kai, a deep fried chicken dish

We demolished the chaufa (fried rice)

Sweet and sour fish

Was this the Chancho con tamarindo (roast pork with tamarind)? Sigh. I need to keep better track of things.

* A few years ago, I'd heard about a series of documentary films about the foods of the Chinese diaspora, and after a quick bit of searching while writing this blog, I'm excited to have run across this video online. I haven't watched it yet and am really looking forward to seeing it and learning more about the culinary and cultural evolution of Chinese cooking.

Stuff on top of stuff

I failed to post something last week because a miserable ailment had just started taking over my head and neck while I was visiting friends in Pittsburgh. After a six-hour visit to the fantastic Fallingwater, I realized that what felt like an irritation in the back of my throat that morning while taking the plane ride to Pittsburgh had blown up into an awful stabbing feeling when I swallowed. Aw, crap. How was I going to have a pierogi on kielbasa sandwich for dinner if my throat wasn't functioning? Never mind that an oncoming fever was making my earlobes feel like hot coals.

I've been harboring an interest in Pittsburgh's food-on-top-of-food sandwiches since, oh, 2007. My friends Claire and Seth were good enough not only to host my weekend visit and drive me all the way out to Fallingwater but also, knowing my food interests, to take me to Primanti Brothers for their famous cole-slaw-and-fries-on-top-of-various-meats-sandwiches. We went to their original location in the Strip District, where I got to see impressive amounts of paraphernalia and tchotchkes devoted to Pittsburgh's sports franchises being sold nearby, as well as the awesome murals inside Primanti's devoted to local heroes, including Mr. Rogers, whom I admire deeply (in a totally non-ironic way).

I ordered the hot sausage and cheese sandwich, Seth got the kolbassi and cheese, and Claire got the bacon and cheese (and egg?). The sandwiches are pretty enormous and come out wrapped in wax paper, no bothering with plates here. The bread is thick cut white bread which has zero flavor and seems there mostly as a means for holding the sandwiches' innards intact; Seth's recommendation to hold the sandwich so that the bread slices are perpendicular to the table surface works, because the bread has no strength to support the weight of all the ingredients.

Overall, I found the sandwich sadly disappointing. The bread had no flavor, the cheese had no flavor or simply didn't exist, and the fries - what I thought would make this sandwich divine - had no flavor either. Of the steak fries variety of cut, they weren't crispy on the outside, which would have provided textural contrast, and added nothing but heft and driness. The cole slaw, on the other hand, was surprisingly good - crisp, of the vinegary (not mayo) variety, which worked for this sandwich, and speckled with lots of black pepper. I would have been happy eating the hot Italian sausage with just a side of the cole slaw, which means that this sandwich, while conceptually brilliant, failed for me in its execution. But, maybe I'll give it one more try (I'll be back in Pittsburgh for work) and go for the kolbassi version.

Back to a chronological order of events: Primanti's for lunch, a 2 hour drive to Fallingwater in the Bear Run Nature Reserve, a 2 hour tour, a 2 hour drive back, then dinner at the Penn Brewery, where my failing health makes it hard for me to enjoy my kielbasa and sauerkraut, but does not prevent me from judging that their pierogies, while nice, are not the best the city has to offer. I'm in bed by 9 with what feels like a raging fever, and get out of bed at 11 the next morning feeling, huh, not too bad.

If I have not mentioned what lovely hosts Claire and Seth are, here are two other examples: 1) they make waffles for brunch (after waiting for me to haul my ass out of bed) and let me drink all their OJ, and 2) knowing my food interests, they suggest that we can pick up a late lunch at Station Street Hot Dogs. I am intrigued by the Devil Dog, which I don't think I can get back home, where I'm pretty sure I can get a kim chee dog.

The Devil Dog has egg salad, Tabasco, scallions, and potato chips on top of an all-beef dog. I love a good devilled egg, and this sounds like a great picnic basket of ingredients that got smashed up in an accident. So Claire takes me to Station Street after we run errands at the nearby Target; she tells me about the changes in the neighborhood and points out Google's nearby office* as we wait for our orders of dogs and duck fat fries. We're the only ones there at 2pm-ish, but Claire tells me this place can get pretty overrun.

Verdict on the Devil Dog: thumbs up. I should have realized, though, that the potato chips, like the duck fat fries, would have lost a bit of their crisp on the ride back, sealed up and steaming in the take out sack. Lacking the potato chip crunch, though, hasn't really harmed the dog. The egg salad's good, although I would have added more hot sauce, and the hot dog itself is very flavorful. Excellent combo - next time I would just add that extra hot sauce and maybe, just maybe, a little sprinkling of celery seed. As for duck fat fries, am I right in thinking that they're overrated? Maybe I just prefer lard.

Maybe I should have put those fries on top of the hot dog.

* I find out later that a friend from my urban planning days was at that very same moment in the Google building hearing about Pittsburgh's revitalization. I had posted to Twitter via Foursquare that I was at Station Street; he saw that and responded that he was in Pittsburgh, too. Interesting.

Putting the "pro" in "procrastination"

I'm supposed to be doing some writing for work but have been putting it off, partly because of a terrible seasonal allergy attack that makes it hard for me to keep my eyes open and partly because, well, I'm a very good procrastinator.

I had the same problem last week while in DC. Bad allergies left me lying on my hotel bed, napping and lolling about due to sneezing fits and sore eyes that medication would not alleviate. Not only did I have no energy to tackle the work I had brought with me (and delayed doing when I was feeling well), I had no energy or desire to eat, which is never a good sign for me. Granted, I'd eaten a good brunch courtesy of my friends John and Joan in Alexandria (two words: bacon scones!!). But I figured I should get something to eat, if only to get out of the hotel and try out a new place.

 

 

Thankfully, just a few blocks away was Birch and Barley, a restaurant I'd tried to dine at before but didn't because of a long wait. (My alternative then was the nearby Ghana Cafe, which I also recommend.) I figured I could eat at the bar, if the place was full, and do a little bit of reading, so I packed up an article and walked up 14th Street.

The beer list attracted me to Birch and Barley in the first place, but given how terrible I was feeling, I decided to take it easy. Just about every beer on the list comes available in a 4 ounce serving, which is handy if you plan to taste several items, or if you just need a small serving. I started off with a 4 ounce glass of Oxbow Farmhouse Pale Ale, a fruity and spicy cask conditioned ale. I picked this because (1) I like to try cask conditioned beers when they're available and (2) I planned on comparing this to the Oxbow Funkhouse Pale Ale, a version of the Farmhouse finished with brettanomyces. (That should give you an idea of the kind of beer list they have here.)

Finally learning after several years that I need to order smaller portions when travelling, since lefotvers don't work unless you've got a microwave in your room, I chose the seared halibut starter and the small portion of veal neck flatbread. (FYI, their Sunday dinner menu is a mashup of breakfast, lunch, and dinner items; I nearly got the chicken and waffles.) I pair the Farmhouse Pale Ale with the halibut and the earthy Funkhouse with the veal neck.

My beer choices were so-so - they tasted fine and went well with my dishes, but neither ale struck me as exciting or notable. The halibut and veal neck, though, I would certainly order again. The halibut came nicely seared, and the firm flesh and crisp skin contrasted texturally well with the slippery and buttery orzo, peas, and mushrooms. (Turns out the halibut also comes as an entree, but I think an appetizer portion works better.)

I expected the veal neck flatbread to be fairly small and on a crispy, toasty sort of bread, but it turned out to be a 4 by 6 inch affair on a plump dough, like an extravagant mini-pizza. Cheesy, earthy, crispy, charred, chewy, salty, fatty, and deeply aromatic - this was wonderful stuff, but very filling, so I ate half and decided to take the leftovers with me for a midnight snack. Reheating them wouldn't be necessary. My only minor criticism of the flatbread and of the halibut was that they could have used a little flavor contrast - both were very delicious but mostly unctuous: I wanted something vinegary or peppery or both to add a little spark.

At this point, I made a mistake. I ordered dessert. Forgetting that desserts in most American restaurants serve four people comfortably, I immediately say yes to the doughnut plate, thinking that the waiter said they were doughnut holes. Instead, out come two enormous doughnuts and one doughnut hole. The hole was chocolate dipped; the others are a toffee bacon creation and a poppy seed glaze. I take a bite of the hole and cut a quarter each of the toffee bacon and poppy seed doughnuts and have them with a good cuppa coffee. The chocolate dipped is fine but mostly just sweet; the toffee bacon is delicious, but it's the poppy seed that surprises. I'm not sure what else they put on that, but I wish I could get it for breakfast all the time. I eyeball what's left on the plate and decide that these, too, should come back to the hotel with me. I make a plan to have these for breakfast with a cup of hotel room coffee, and it turns out to be a good plan.

So I've eaten my way through all this food (total price tag about $45), have a "midnight" snack and breakfast ready to go, and distractedly finished one article between sips, bites, brief chats with the waiter, who seems genuinely happy that I'm happy with my meal, moments of staring into the distance appreciating my food, and occasional bouts of sneezing. The non-work to work ratio is pretty high, and only gets higher when I return to my hotel room, where I set upon reading various style magazines left for the guests and then watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones, which is when I polish off the rest of my flatbread.

I believe I've now spent 30 minutes writing this blog when I should have been working. How about that?

What I drank this week

At Saxon and Parole:

• Celery gimlet - Spring 44 gin, green Chartreuse, St. Germain, lime, celery, verjus. One of the best cocktails I have had in ages, and I don't even like celery that much. This is my drink for the summer. Having a gigantic pitcher of this on hand at all times would make me very happy.
• Corpse Reviver #3 - Dorothy parker gin, lillet blanc, combier, fennel juice. Note the root vegetable theme continuing with the fennel juice. A good drink but not entirely memorable; maybe I needed another for a true revival, versus a Walking Dead outcome. I didn't stop to think about what versions 1 and 2 of the corpse reviver would be like.

At Blaue Gans:

• The Klimt - Sekt Blanc de Blanc, Campari, Cointreau, Plymouth Gin. If you like Negronis, you'll like this. I happen to like Negronis a lot.
• Hungarian Paprika Margarita - Jose Cuervo Silver, Cointreau, Lime Juice, Paprika. I wasn't sure what to expect, but this went very nicely with my currywurst. The paprika reminded me of li hing mui powder. Second best drink this week, after the celery gimlet.

At Salt & Fat:

• No cocktails, unfortunately, so I got a Sixpoint Bengali Tiger IPA. In hindsight, I think I should have had a pilsner with my meal, which I'll review in an upcoming blog.

At Boca Chica:

• The aged cuban or old cuban? I can't find their drink list online. That's too bad. Well, there was rum and mint in it, and I had one on the rocks and one straight up. Order it on the rocks, and it comes in a tumbler; order it straight up, and it comes in a martini glass. Why? I don't know. But it tastes better straight up.

Not sure if I'll be having anything tonight. My liver could probably use a break. My wallet, too!

Revisionist history, or, how I started the NYC banh mi craze

In the fall of 1999, I slogged over to the Manhattan Bridge from my office on Broadway and White Street with two of my colleagues in tow. Our mission: get our hands on some banh mi.

I was thirty years old, and I'd never had a banh mi sandwich in my life. The subject somehow came up during one of my many conversations with my sister and mom about food (or one long conversation with occasional interruptions). Maybe my sister was reminiscing about the sandwiches she'd had back home in Honolulu. Anyhow, they sure sounded good, even though I'm normally not a fan of sandwiches. But where to find some in the city?

I think my mom was the one who tipped me off to Saigon Banh Mi, which was somewhere in the eastern part of Manhattan's Chinatown, under the Manhattan Bridge near the pick up and drop off locations of the cheap Chinatown buses. How I got my co-workers Nick and Liza interested in doing a lunch excursion, I cannot remember. It was a bit of hike, particularly when we didn't know the most efficient route to get to our destination. On the way over, I believe Liza told us that her dad was about to get his second novel published.

Finally, we found the tiny sandwich shop storefront. You had to scuttle in sideways like a crab to get into the narrow space, and, if I remember right, the only variation you could request to the one sandwich on order was whether you wanted it spicy. No room to sit and eat, just carry out. Did I get a grass jelly drink there, too?

My life, thankfully, is filled with moments of great enjoyment brought on by eating delicious things. In some cases, I sour those moments by wondering, "Why the hell has it taken me so long to learn about this?" Like the first time I had xiao long bao or portobello mushrooms (in my mid- and early twenties, respectively) - how'd I live all those years without such great food? Banh mi did that to me in 1999. Now, it's everywhere, but so many versions just suck. I was lucky to get introduced to an excellent version of the sandwich - the baguette crispy enough to shred the roof of my mouth; the luscious pate and carmelized grilled pork providing complex tastes and textures, and, of course, delectable meatiness; and the mayo, jalapeno, hot sauce, cilantro, and pickled daikon and carrots bringing liveliness and piquancy and crunch (well, not the mayo and hot sauce; don't make me re-write this for clarity). The flavors were bold and harmonious; this sandwich had lots of things going on in there!

Maybe two or three weeks later, I got a call at the office. The woman on the line cut to the chase: "This is Gail Green. Liza told me that you had a great sandwich recently. Can you give me the address to the place?" Yeah, okay. I hung up and turned to ask Nick, whose desk was near mine, "Who's Gail Green?" In this small world, it turns out to be Gael Greene, who knows Liza's dad, who's not only a novelist but a journalist and worked with her (I think), so word of the banh mi "discovery" didn't take long to get to the right ears and, I believe, out to the eating public.*

Banh Mi Saigon has moved to what I think are more spacious quarters in Chinatown; I haven't been to the "new" location. When we moved further away to offices in the Woolworth Building, my colleague Jon would kindly take orders from banh mi craving co-workers and bike over to pick up sandwiches for us. Nowadays, I will occasionally get a banh mi from some place nearby, but they seem either way overpriced (my friend Arnold would refuse to buy a banh mi that cost more than $4.50) or just disappointingly blah.

I fear like I sound like an old codger ("back in the day I could get a great banh mi!"), and I'm sure I could enjoy a perfectly lovely banh mi if I actually got out of my chair and looked for one. In fact, I may just try the Lin-sanity banh mi one day soon. The craze continues.

* I can't recall or verify what happened after that call - I assume Greene wrote something about Saigon Banh MI but can't find traces on the interwebs. Maybe I should have titled this post "speculative history," as I'm perfectly happy to speculate rather than verify my role in popularizing banh mi. Actually, I could care less about getting any "credit"; I just think this is a funny story. What I really want to know is how my mom or sister found out about Saigon Banh MI in the first place. To be continued...

Sweet or savory? How about both?

It's almost April, and I feel like I haven't gone anywhere at all this year. Compared to last year, I think I'll be travelling a lot less, or at least to fewer places. Which puts me in a "grass in always greener" state of mind - I wouldn't mind getting out of the office a bit more, just to get a change of scenery, meet some new people, add different inputs and observations into my brain, and, of course, try out local restaurants and specialities. But for now, I'll reminisce.

Last year, I jumped at the chance to go to a conference in Portland, OR, putting aside Portlandia idiosyncrasies, because the eating there is good and it gave me the opportunity to visit friends there and up in Seattle.

I had read about the famous bacon maple bar at Voodoo Doughnut, the creation of which I believe preceded the giant (and still rising?) trend of "put bacon in and on everything." As a stubborn contrarian, I will often allow myself to miss out on good things simply because they fall within a broad trend, but even though I am more aware of this character flaw, I was still on the fence about giving the bacon maple bar a try.

So I surprised myself by standing in an already very long line at Voodoo Doughnuts on a Sunday morning, after I'd already eaten an excellent and substantial breakfast at the nearby Morning Star Cafe. I must have been following a principle similar to the one about not shopping for groceries while you're hungry - since I was already full and happy, standing in line didn't make me impatient and grouchy. I just observed all the other folks in line (how many were tourists, like me, versus locals? how many were here for this crazy bacon donut concoction? how many were hungover?) and made plans to meet up with friends later in the day / during my stay.

But once I got my doughnut, I had a conundrum on my hands.

This was big. It looked great but smelled awfully sweet, and I don't have much of a sweet tooth. Plus, I was already full. Not uncomfortably full, but full enough to know that if I ate this right away, I would regret it. So I took this back to my hotel room, with the plan to try a bite before getting on a bus to visit friends of mine from college for lunch. I bought a cup of coffee to help counteract what I thought would be too much maple syrup sweetness, and waited for my stomach to feel just a tiny bit emptier or for my curiosity to get the better of me, whichever one came first, before I gave this a try.

Eventually, I took my first bite, being careful to get a good combination of the raised yeast doughnut, maple topping, and bacon, so that the flavor mix would be right. I could immediately feel my teeth beginning to ache slightly from the sweetness of the maple spread and the dough of the doughnut, but then the salty, crunchy, smoky, fatty, savory bacon quickly brought things into proper balance. Applause in my mouth! This could have been a horrible mistake, but the maple bacon bar really did work, i.e., taste good, achieving the right harmony between sweet and savory, crunchy and chewy.

But one bite was enough, for the time being. (I saved the rest for a post-lunch dessert.)