Luckys Famous Burgers

You know there can't be too many worthy burgers to be eaten in Singapore when Carl's Junior is the most serious contender. Hence, I entertain my boyfriend's whims to eat burgers (as with creme brulee and too many bowls of onion soup) with minimal persuasion, or coercion involved. Also, I was interested in checking out Lucky's, a somewhat new burger place 2 blocks from home, and so we went.
While Lucky's was pretty busy on a weekend afternoon the last time I passed by, the sitting area was relatively empty and customer-free. We were a little skeptical, but got past that quickly, ordered our food at the counter and sat down on the uncomfortable and very bright chairs. While waiting, the 3 plasma screens mounted on orange walls provided us with entertainment in the form of tonight's Yankees game. Besides the plasma screen, there wasn't anything else to distract you from your burger, or the bright walls or bright furniture so flourescent that they bordered on being clinically deranged.
I had the standard cheese burger while the bf went upscale and ordered the swiss cheese and mushroom burger for $2 more. We also ordered an order of crinkled fries to share, which at $3 was not a great deal, but I don't care coz what is a burger without fries? Also, the fries were fantastic with the spicy "lucky" sauce that was served alongside it. The burger was not too charred and was juicy enough, enough though slightly more cooked than I normally like my burgers. P's burger was less well received however, as the cheese was not melted enough and the mushrooms were a little underseasoned... We also bought a burger and some humongous onion rings back for my sister, who was blase about her burger as well. I think burgers don't travel well, that's why. Nevertheless, a good burger in the neighborhood in my humble opinion, in a psychotically cheerful environment. I would go back.

Lucky's Famous Burgers
52nd st, bet 8th & 9th Ave

Bouchon Bakery

I make a trip to the mall every Sunday at 10:30 am. I'm not quite the only person in the mall at 10:30 am. The shop assistants are dressing up the mannequins; the early grocery shoppers are taking the escalator down to whole foods to buy their sunday supper; the tourists, always early birds have just finished their walk through central park and are enjoying the cool respite of the air-conditioning. And I, without having to jostle my way through the crowd unlike any other time of the day make my way to the third floor, to Bouchon Bakery's take out counter. So far, I've had a good brioche and sticky bun, an eh macaroon and great croissant and a pain au raisins. I'm crazy about the raisin croissant in particular, sweet, sticky, flaky, chewy... Sometimes i bring a book to read, and other times I pretend to do some work, but really, I am there to drink my coffee and munch on my pastry, and watch life pass by as I enjoy some alone time in a mall, being anonymous in the city, just before the usual humdrum sets in. How sweet are the weekends...

Bouchon Bakery
10 Columbus Circle, 3rd Floor

Sakagura

Eel encased in Tamago
The persistent rain and Ying's tight schedule ruined our plans to have Asian tapas down in LES, so we decided to pursue small plates of a different sort at Sakagura, which came to our attention by way of a NY Times article and Yanru's Japanese salesperson acquaintance's recommendation. Sakagura is known in the city as a place for sake, but even if you are not a fan of sake (we weren't), it still makes for a great spot for authentic, non-sushi (as advertised by the restaurant's website) Japanese grub in an unpretensious, but un-ghetto like underground restaurant.
For the uninitiated, Sakagura can be tricky to find, as it is stuck in the basement of an undistinguished office building in midtown. It did not help that google maps was playing tricks on me and gave me a wrong location. But no matter, we soon got to the address, and after walking down a scary looking flight of stairs into the basement, we soon found ourselves in a clean and cavernous space, nothing like the dank and narrow staircase that led us to it seem to suggest. The room was dimly lit, but not so dark you cannot see your food, and while suitable for rambunctious groups, was quite enough so that pairs and trios of diners will find it easy enough to conduct civilised conversation as well.
The food comes in small plates, well-priced under $10. Our server recommended that we each picked 3 plates, but a better suggestion might be to start with 2 each and work your way through the drinks and dishes before ordering more. We ended up with 8 dishes, including a dessert and that made for a filling meal already.
The NY Times likened Sakagura to a pub, but as with everything Japanese, the food was just daintier, prettier and tastier. We had a range of dishes, from the raw fluke sashimi served with ponzu sauce, to the heartier meat dishes like the chunky 4 sq inches of BUTA KAKUNI (fatty pork belly simmered in a soy and sugar sauce) and shredded beef ribs slow-cooked in a flavorful broth and served with a generous lump of shredded daikon. The Japanese omelette is familiar to everyone who eats cooked sushi, but comes with a twist, or a sliver of broiled eel folded in the middle. The deep fried dishes were also well executed. The tori-kaarage was moist and the marinade smelled wonderfully gingery, and the shrimp balls were soft and almond slices encasing it provided a good crunch. Personally though, i thought the almond could have been better served if it had been crushed into smaller pieces instead. The salmon ochazuke (rice in broth, topped with a slice of poached salmon) closed the savory part of the meal, simple and austere, cleansing the sweet, tart, salty flavors off our tongues with the tea broth. While simple and non-too original, we felt comforted by the home-style food, dishes a Japanese mum with a deft hand at seasoning would make for her brood, and dishes we wished we could make at home, with a little more care and a little bit more time on our hands.
Of course we had dessert... We shared a pear mille feuille, which was presented as a sandwich, only that the puff pastry contained more butter than any pullman loaf you've eaten, and the filling was soft pear poached in simple syrup, served with a dollop of cold creamy custard. The mille feuille was served with a scoop of houji icecream that alternated between sweet and bitter. Yummy.
Since sake was the name of the game, we also tried a flight of 3 sakes and reaffirmed our conviction that sake was not our poison of choice. However, alcohol does tend to make us chattier so we sat and talked for almost and hour after the meal was complete and our bill was paid for. And there was never a rush to check for the bill nor did the servers shoot us disapproving looks the whole time. This restaurant is a keeper.

Sakagura
211 E43rd St, B1 (Bet 2nd & 3rd Ave)

Chocolate Haven

Trust the French to call a less than healthy obsession on haute chocolaterie "un péché mignon", or an adorable sin. Well, adorable or not, I do have a pretty big sweet tooth, and an appreciation for good chocolate. Thank goodness I live in New York, the land of $5 chocolate bars and gourmet chocolate shoppes, ranging from artisanal local names like Kee's to conglomeratized mega- brands such as Fauchon and La Maison du Chocolate. Chocolate Haven sits in the middle of the spectrum, a large enough enterprise to have 2 factories and a website selling a whole gamut of cocoa-loaded goodies and a celebrity chocolatier at the helm, but still small and localized enough to be quintessentially New York.
Chocolate Haven's owner is Jacque Torres, dessert wunderkind and ex-dessert chef at the legendary Le Cirque. Besides all those titles, he has also been called the city's Willy Wonka and in his shop/factory down on Hudson Street, I could see why. Instead of the austere decor in La Maison du Chocolate, the walls within Chocolate Haven are painted in vibrant reds and oranges. The servers (aka. Jacque's Oompa Loompas) were likewise dressed in bright reds, greens and yellow tops and all wore weird multicolored braided headdress of sorts, as though as they were wrongly transplanted in the greyish cityscape, and should have been in a tropical rainforest instead.
Some things to try while in the shop are the signature hot chocolate (in the normal and wicked version, wicked being spiced i think); the chocolate truffles and the chocolate chip cookies, and during the hot summer months, the decadent cookies and icecream, in the form of an ice-cream sandwich. And if you are looking for some more durable gifts, the chocolate bars, as well as the bags of chocolate dipped sweets, ranging from marshmallows to expresso beans to malt balls. While not as blatantly New York as bagels and pretzels, these chocolates make an equally worthy food present from the Big Apple.

Chocolate Haven
350 Hudson St

The 7 train and Cantonese food

There is something about the 7 train that I find utterly charming. It could be the fact that it hurtles through the railway tracks at breakneck speed, as though the train drivers are paid according to how fast they drive, or that it rumbles unapologetically throughout the entire trip to finally spit its passengers out into the heart of mainland china. In any case, for manhattanites smittened with teochew duck and taiwanese oyster omelettes, you would have to endure the slightly painful journey via the 7 train to get to Flushing to get to those local delicacies.

Cantonese food, however is another matter. Manhattan's Chinatown is the stronghold for early chinese immigrants who hailed from Hong Kong and Guangzhou, and consequently, there is no lack of decent cantonese restaurants on the island, from the hole-in-the wall Hong Kong style cafes to large banquet restaurants. In fact, Ruoying and I had enjoyed a really enjoyable and dirt-cheap lunch at New Wonton Garden just the other day.

Ruoying's ordered the namesake wonton noodles with charsiew and the wontons were plump and juicy while the egg noodles had just the right elasticity to it. My beef brisket with hor fun was equally impressive and I slurped up every single drop of the flavorful beef broth, no doubt boiled for long hours over slow heat in a pot that probably gets a good scrub once every 5 years.

Given the ample supply of fair to good cantonese restaurants in the city, it would seem strange that we chose to eat at a Cantonese restaurant for dinner at Flushing last night. It was less a conscious decision but more a result borne out of a series of happy accidents yesterday:
1. First deciding to go to Flushing for dinner after finding out that taking the E train followed by a transfer on the 7 train would cut travelling time by 15 mins (after 1 yr, me and the subway system still don't get along)
2. Getting there for free, after a tourist who was going home but still had money in his metrocard kindly offered his card, with the remaining value to the first person he saw in the station (me!)
3. Choosing the restaurant by getting lost in Queens and finally stumbling onto prince street, then marching into the restaurant based on the crowd of old folks and their kids standing impatiently outside, without any notion about cuisine they served. We figured that if the cantonese grandpas and grandmas can stomach the wait outside, in a not so cool night, to eat here, so could we. It was only after we had stepped out of the restaurant at the conclusion of a great meal that we discovered, located on the old-fashioned red awnings, are 2 capitalized words "Canton Gourmet".
But what an awesome meal it was! Between my sister and I, we had garlic stir-fried spinach, less oily and light on the seasoning that several other versions we have had in other restaurants; a fine steamed chicken boldly flavored with a viscous ginger sauce and some unidentifiable chinese herbs; and a plate of sweet and succulent shrimp, deep fried with the lightest coat of batter and then flash fried with a mixture of minced shallots, ginger, garlic, scallions and dried red peppers. YUM...And once again, we left wondering, "how do the chinese restaurateurs manage to make a profit by charging us so little?" Our only regret was not coming out to Flushing with a couple more people, so that we could try more dishes, such as the goose web casserole; the cereal crab, which was a house specialty and really great looking steamed fish, whereby the patrons get to choose the fish from the big tanks adorning an entire wall and then elect the way they want it cooked. Well, another time, another meal, another subway ride...

New Wonton Garden
56 Mott St (at Bayard St)

Canton Gourmet
38-08 Prince St, Flushing

HK

A couple thoughts about my dinner at HK, a more upscale version of the neighborhood diner, with a fun vibe and decent prices a few days ago:
1. While HK is understandably an acronym for Hell's Kitchen, where the restaurant is situated, HK is more known as the acronym for Hong Kong. This led to many confused dinner companions, who called to ask "where are we eating again? wok and roll?"
2. Despite reading dire warnings about the service (or lack of one), the servers were surprisingly prompt at refilling our glasses and very nice about sending some bread our way. But isn't bread something restaurants dole out for free anyway?
3. The vibe is cool and youngish, and the decor sparse but in a good way. Just a little incongruous with the rest of the block and the whole area surrounding the Port Authority, but that's not their fault i guess.
4. "The attack of the loudmouths" was the soundtrack of the night, or at least the first half of the evening. A group of diners sitting at the back of the room was talking and chortling so loudly that we seriously contemplated leaving the restaurant. I hope they aren't regulars so the sake of the rest of the diners' sanity.
5. The fried calamari was really hot, chewy and crunchy. The entrees were less noteworthy, but fairly decent for the neighborhood. My chicken paillard was on the dry side, while gerrie's pasta was too creamy. The sandwiches weren't bad though.
6. Other considerations: HK serves up a mean brunch, and is worth a visit especially if you are planning to explore the flea market next to it after lunch.

HK
523 9th Ave (bet 38th and 39th St)

Jiannetto's Pizza & Sullivan Street Bakery

I had two slices of oddly shaped pizza this past week, one from Jiannetto's pizza truck in Midtown and the other from Sullivan Street Bakery. Both were squarish, cut from oblong strips of dough. Call me a traditionalist, but I like my pies nice and round, with a clear delineation between the crust and the sauce and toppings. The shape of the pies aside, I enjoyed both square offerings, Jiannetto's plain pizza, which is baked on location (inside a customized truck) , and topped with fresh tomato sauce, basil and minimal parmesan cheese, is a much healthier option for pizza compared to other midtown options. At $2.25 a slice, it also makes for a frugal lunch, although one slice is seldom filling enough for a person.
While Janetto's pizza is a just square version of the usual neapolitan pizza, to call Sullivan Street Bakery's pizza bianca pizza is quite misleading to one accustomed to the usual pizza pie. It should be called bread on crack or something. The bakers at Sullivan Street Bakery are geniuses for coming up with the chewiest, tastiest bread i have ever had. Pizza bianca is somewhat akin to flatbread, just slightly oily, studded with rosemary and a good sprinkling of salt. It is also oh so fragrant that I can finish a huge slice by myself just walking from the bakery back home, a short 2 avenue blocks away. It has become a saturday tradition to go to the gym in the morning, and then run to the bakery and reward myself with a slice of pizza bianca, which with all the carbs and fats probably about 5423 calories per gigantic slice, but I don't care.
I have also tried their pizza pomodoro to comparisons sake. Sadly I didn't enjoy it that much. After tearing through slices and slices of amazingly tasty pizza bianca, I found the smaller, thinner, tomato-puree encased slice to be too crunchy and a little unwhelming. At $2.75 a slice, I could get almost 2 slices of pizza bianca ($1.50) for the same price. I would take that option any day, and even if they upped the prices, I think I will still find myself jogging over to the bakery faithfully every saturday for the slice to kickstart my weekend.

Jiannetto's pizza truck
47th St and Park Ave

Sullivan Street Bakery
533 W47th St (Between 10th and 11th Ave)

Brasserie LCB

2 days since my dinner at Brasserie LCB and I am still reeling from dinner. Was I reeling from the thick gooeyness of the french onion soup? Or the creamy unctuousness of the foie gras terrine? Or was it the perfectly light grand marnier souffle served with a rich creme anglais that concluded our satisfying meal? Perhaps it was the polished service or the lively dinner conservation with a bunch of loud and fun friends...


Sadly, it was the price of my entree, a plate of dover sole meuneire, an entree that was priced to market. Was it good? Sure, the flesh was delectably fresh, the fish being lightly dredged in flour and fried, served with some unmemorable greens and a very fall-like sweet potato puree. But was it worth the price? At $45, a resolute no. Especially when most of the other entrees on the menu was well within the $20-30 bracket and the grilled salmon served on a bed of sauerkraut that katy had enjoyed was only $23, half what I had paid for my more "exotic" fish. I could have had lobster for $10 less. Why is sole so expensive beats me. Ah well, serves me right for not checking the prices before hand....
Despite the sticker shock, the restaurant, with its very old-world charm (with mainly septuagenarians as diners to boot), solidly executed traditional dishes ( the older-fashioned the dish, the better) and amazing souffles is still a pretty decent choice for a night of slightly expensive french fare. Just be sure, as with everywhere else you go, to ask for the prices of specials or be subject to ordering something that could eventually be too much to stomach.

Brasserie LCB Rachou
60th W55th St (Bet 5th and 6th Ave)

Otto - GelOtto & Pizza

We thought we were invincible. We had by either sheer luck or too much persistence managed to fish out a lot of kate spade goodies, in relative good shape, for very little moolah and were very pleased with ourselves. If we could pack so much shopping in such a short time, we rationalized, what's a short walk from Century 21 to the village for pizza and some oddly flavored ice cream? What's wrong with strolling in the sun, with no sunblock on a 90 degree day? We are from the tropics and therefore had a natural immunity to sweltering heat, or so we thought.
Just so you know, we did manage to get to Washington Square Park and did locate Otto. We also ate there. But the hour long walk was anything but short, and the initial excitement about trying olive oil gelato for the first time had died down somewhere between tribeca and soho. By the time we stumbled into the restaurant, thoroughly dehydrated and very sweaty at 4 pm we just wanted to crash into the chairs and be fed as quickly as possible.
It is under this premise that Ruoying and I tried the pizza and pasta at Otto, the most affordable Mario Batali-related establishment in the city. I had very inexplicably imagined the restaurant to be in a tiny and quaint cornershop, but it was pretty cavernous and comfortably dark. While it was extremely quiet at 4 pm, I can imagine it being a bustling and jam packed place during more normal dining hours. We ordered quickly and played safe on our choices. At 4pm, we really didn't need added grief if the pizza lardo (lard on bread, dad would kill to try this) didn't come up to our expectations. The server and efficient server, as if sensing our hunger (which is pretty apparent, it being 4 pm for lunch and all) served us rather quickly and plied us with bread and numerous refills of water. We tried the penne alla norma, very al dente, which is the way I like it but less to Ruoying's liking. But the eggplant was nicely done and Ruoying, normally averse to eggplant actually fought me to get to the last couple of eggplant bits on the plate. The ricotta also binded rest of the ingredients together well without being an overkill.. The pizza margherita was also very yummy with a thin crispy base. An afficionado of thick and chewy dough probably would not appreciate it so much however.
With our tummies sated and with us having sufficiently recovered from our unfortunate walk, we then contemplated our gelato choices. Pickings were mainly conventional save for the house specialty olive oil gelato. We chose that of course, as well as chocolate and the hazelnut flavors. The trio was quite a good balance, with the saltiness of the olive oil balancing the sweet nutty hazelnut flavor. The chocolate flavor was somehow less creamy and more sorbetty, and served as a palate cleanser of sorts. Oddly, I was a little disappointed by the olive oil gelato, i had imagined it to be a putrid green or yellow and tasting of solidified evoo. Silly me, Mario Batali and crew obviously have a more understated and sophisticated palate than that! After all, he is an Iron Chef..
The wine selection at Otto is enormous and given its surprising affordability, I can't wait to bring Peishan there when she's in town again =)


p.s.: I thought i saw susan sarandon while in the bathroom. She had curly hair and a nice mellow voice. I was probably mistakened, but after spotting johnny depp and spiderman in the past 2 wks, I wouldn't be surprised if it was her too... i love the cheap thrill of celeb spotting, don't you?
Otto
1 Fifth Ave (on 8th St)

Chinese Mirch

My PM managed to wheedle a meal out of my boss, for not informing us of his top secret island wedding and even worst, not bringing back some traditional Indian sweets to celebrate. So off we went to Curry Hill for a large and joyous meal to celebrate the occasion.
My boss chose to bring us to lunch at Chinese Mirch, a restaurant on Curry Hill specialising in Indian-Chinese food. The idea of marrying Chinese food with Indian spices, according to a blurb on the front page of the menu, was a brainchild of an early Chinese immigrant with the most mundane of names, someone called Yong Ah Huat (something like that) who arrived in the India, hankering for some hometown food hundreds of years ago. Hence, he introduced chinese food to India and it had apparently thrived in the subcontinent ever since. Unfortunately, a restaurant dishing out Indian-Chinese food hardly sounds exotic enough to people who grew up eating both ethnic cuisines, therefore I've never had it before. Still the popularity is not hard to imagine, given the universal appeal of Chinese food.
So how was the food? It was strange to me at first, because the scent and presentation was so Chinese, yet when you tasted it, there was not a doubt that it had been tampered with Indian spices and ways of cooking. We especially liked the Gobi Manchurian, which tasted more like Aloo Gobi than anything Chinese; the deep fried okra, dusted with paprika and crunchy like fries; and the complimentary dessert, a take on chinese sugared apples/yam/other fruit, with molten sugar poured atop deep fried wonton skin, with sesame seeds sprinkled liberally on top to provide extra oriental flavor. They really do a good job with their deep fried dishes.
But while my colleagues enjoyed the largely spicy entrees, I thought it was a shame that many of the dishes such as the chicken manchurian and the chili paneer came swimming in dark gloopy sauces. I know brown sauce, to many American Chinese food eaters, is a requisite component of a Chinese dish, but still the main ingredients would have had a better chance to shine with a drier finish than being brown-sauced to death. The only entrees i truly enjoyed was the spicy lamb with red, not brown sauce and a thoroughly chinese chicken dish, generously flavored with ginger, spring onions and tonnes of garlic.
So in the end, I liked the space, coolly decorated with some chinese accents including bamboo-print wallpaper and some lanterns, but was mainly ambivalent about the food. Its great fun to try a new cuisine, but subjectively speaking, the sum of parts was not any greater than the separate parts. I'll take a dosa over manchurian chicken anytime.

Chinese Mirch
120 Lexington Ave (28th St)

We ate local

Malaysian food that is...
Its funny how I do not hunger for Singapore/Malaysian food for about half a year, and the moment I eat it once, I need to get my fix on a weekly basis. Its not a very healthy addiction, but luckily in Manhattan, with a shocking abundance of Malaysian restaurants, its easily fed.
Yanru and I met up on Saturday to get Rosie a housewarming gift. Brunch however, was first on our minds, with the gift being more of an afterthought. Yanru had initially suggested crepes and coffee at cafe le gamin in east village, but I made her "reconsider her suggestion " and go to Sanur (aka New Indonesia & Malaysia Restaurant) after she bragged about the cheap and good meal at Sanur she had on thursday night, complete with nonya kueh and pandan cake for dessert and breakfast the morning after. So we decided to get our butts out of our apartments early to grab some good old local breakfast, preferably fried beehoon drenched in vegetable curry.
Unfortunately, people in Chinatown eat breakfast a lot earlier than we do and by the time we got to Sanur, no later than 11 am too, the bee hoon was gone... =( It was dirt cheap too at $1.75.... I was muy upset...
We drowned our sorrows instead by downing cheap coffee and eating too much nonya pastries and other stuff. I forgot to take pictures but we ate: lor mai kai, curry puffs, some nasi kuning thingy with ikan bilis, a glutinous rice kueh with gula melaka, and kueh lapis (the colorful one, not the indonesian type) With all that glutinous rice we had, we were quickly sated. Still, I'm hankering for the beehoon that had escaped from my gluttonous clutches and will probably be back soon to get my hands on it.
p.s. the curry puffs were really good, better than Old Chang Kee in fact, and travels very well.. And cheap, for $0.70/piece... convert tt back to SGD and its still comparable to OCK. The 2 I carried in my purse for a day made for a squashed but very tasty snack after being warmed in the oven.

Sanur
18 Doyers St (a very charming, winding street)

Pomaire

A danger one faces when dining around Times Square is picking the wrong places, places that are meant as tourist traps serving expensive and bland food in a cheesy environ where servers, beyond bringing food to the table, try their darndest selling you sparkling water and expensive bottles of wine. Thus, when we decided to eat on the infamous restaurant row on 46th st this weekend, I sifted through recommendations from friends, authoritative new york food blogs and review sites to weed out the duds and to shortlist some potential places. In the end, I picked Pomaire over Becco, for the great reviews it got and the prospect of trying a novel cuisine, Chilean to be exact. Also, the thought of the All You Can Eat pasta deal at Becco was far too allluring and a truly dangerous path to take for a carb fanatic such as I.
Pomaire, advertised blatantly as the only Chilean restaurant in Manhattan serves up some traditional Chilean alongside entrees, such as panfried salmon and steak, that would not look out of place in most new american restaurants. I cannot judge the authenticity of the food, this being my first Chilean meal, but everyone thought favorably of their entrees. Ceci admired the texture of her pan fried hake while Ruoying's combo of juicy ribs and warm mashed potato was full of flavor. I ordered one of the most traditional dish on the menu, the cazuela, or a chicken stew with root vegetables and rice and enjoyed it too, although it tasted too much like the chicken soup I cook at home and didn't merit the $17 price tag.
Appetizers were less successful, the tamale being too watery and the empanadas just normal. And desserts were quite a disaster. The Thousand Layered cake tasted stale, the merengue cake tasted like confectionery sugar and the papayas in syrup were just that, papayas in syrup. All were too sweet, and a real pity because if done properly, the desserts could have been a stellar end to the meal.
We did however, love the extra attentive service. The servers were funny, patient, and went the extra mile to 1) turn an order of 2 large empanadas to 5 small ones so that we could have individual empanadas and 2) to gallantly retrieve my root vegetables from the cazuela to prevent them from disintegrating in the broth and bringing my extra hot sauce to spice the broth up. They weren't overly pushy about selling overpriced drinks, but I thought they figured that we were an easy sell because Gerri's Dad was eager to try all their recommendations and they could have taken some liberty by recommending a pricier bottle of wine and pushing more desserts than we could handle. Then again, I could be overly cautious, this being Restaurant Row and all.
So overall, the meal was enjoyable although the food was only average and a tad expensive, truth to be told. The ambience was quaint but not too chintzy and the warm service redeemed whatever misgivings I had about the food. However, it will be a while before I go back as the quality of the food just didn't warrant the price tag. Still, big thanks to UNCLE & AUNTY for the wonderful meal!

Pomaire
371 W46th St (bet. 8th & 9th Ave)

Restorant Malaysia

Restorant Malaysia looks nondescript from the outside, tucked in the middle of a busy row of restaurants serving anything from taiwan beef noodles to foo chow fishballs. The shop front is narrow and the window was grimy from years of soot, soot created from the satay and stingray freshly barbeque-ed in the front of the restaurant. It is not a very attractive looking restaurant and you would walk right past it if you were not hankering for some authentic Malaysian grub, and Ruoying and I almost gave it a miss. Still, the lure of sambal kangkong and roti prata proved to be too much for two homesick Singaporeans and we walked in to find ourselves ordering way too much and with each bite, connecting what we see, eat and smell with events that happened long ago, linking each dish with places and faces we miss.
We shared a plate of hokkien fried noodles, malaysia styled; hakka style pearl noodles; bbq-ed stingray and finally a plate of sambal kangkong. The dishes were extremely flavorful, smelling of parfum de wok, the wok scent that you find at good zi-char places. The hokkien fried noodles reminded us of saturday lunches in Singapore, with Pa wielding the wok and cooking up enormous amounts of the same noodles in dark gooey sauce. The grilled stingray tasted like those at East Coast Park, plump, succulent and the perfect foil for the huge dish of sambal belacan that came with it. Ruoying was so excited to see the pickled green chillies that by the time we were done with dinner, we had eaten half a bowl of green chillies with our noodle dishes. We could have easily finished everything there, but great discipline restrained ourselves from becoming even bigger girls than we already are and brought most of the kangkong home.
Back home tody, we decided to complemented the kangkong, which by the way microwaves very well with homemade nasi lemak, fried egg and luncheon meat. Its strange how food ties people and places together, and the wave of nostalgia and the regret from being so far from home has not been so strong in a while. Maybe its a good thing that the restaurant's in Flushing and not anywhere closer and the Malaysian restaurants in Manhattan are not nearly as authentic, or else I might be flooded with homesickness everytime i visit!

Nougatine

It was a hot, sultry afternoon on the last week of May. The girls' blouses were damp by the time they reached Trump International Hotel and gratefully they ducked into the cool recesses of the towering building. The droning noise from the streets ceased as they entered the hotel's famous restaurant and were greeted by a trio of smiling hostesses. "Welcome to Jean-Georges. Your table is ready. "
Today, I played hooky from studying and with Ruoying, was set to enjoy 3 hours pretending to be a lady who lunch. Our destination, Nougatine, the casual dining space adjacent to Jean Georges, celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten's flagship restaurant. While we couldn't afford to feast on caviar on coddled eggs, thanks to a welcome attempt to bring elegant dining to the masses, were able to enjoy a 3 course lunch for $24.07 each. Walking into the restaurant, we were brought into a cool and airy space that was Nougatine. The bright and clean room, along with powerful air-conditioning, helped cool us down as we contemplated the short menu, consisting of 2 choices for each of the 3 courses. We chose everything naturally, save for the pasta dish that neither one was willing to forgo the steak for.
The appetizers came soon after we finished our first rolls, which were cold but tasty as cold rolls went.
A pink watermelon gazpacho slid easily down the throat, occasionally surprising us with the sharpness coming from the chili mixed into the soup. A dish of a poached egg wobbling atop a bed of asparagus and shaved bacon bits on the hand was hearty and highlighted the sweetness of fresh and young asparagus perfectly.
Soon after, entrees were served. Both of us ordered the steak with ginger polenta and sauteed greens. The meat was flavorful but why did it remind us of chinese sauteed beef? Perhaps it was the ginger, too familiar to our Asian tastebuds. Still, the beef was nicely done despite the ginger overkill.
Desserts came next, two simply dishes, unfussy but not unsophisticated. The blueberry pie was sweet and tart, the fruit sauce further accentuated by a tinge of meyer lemon and a light vanilla ice cream flecked with vanilla bean. The white chocolate pot de creme with strawberry sorbet and a light chocolate mousse was light but rich at the same time, and the tartness of the fruit helped quell the queasiness from eating too much cream.
Too soon, lunch was over. While not a stunning meal, it was still a solid lunch and a welcome respite from the mundane life of a working lady and a student. Sated, we walked out of the hotel back into the crowded streets of New York, allowing the humid air to lull us into a dull drowsiness that the big meal had started for us...

Basta Pasta

In honor of Xinghong's graduation, we hit Basta Pasta for some Jap-Italian (Italianese, Jatalian) food to witness what the Japanese can do to classic Italian cuisine. While pan-asian fusion food is commonplace (foie gras wonton anyone?) and championed by many influential celebrity chefs in the city, Basta Pasta is quite the anomaly as it injects asian sensibilities into western cuisines without killing the italianness of its food. What do I mean? While you do see some Japanese ingredients in certain menu items and the portions are on the light side, most of the dishes remain true to form and very classically italian.
We started the meal with breadsticks, followed by bruschetta with a cheese spread before they finally brought out the bread basket stocked with 4 types of bread. Yup, 3 bread-related courses before the meal began in earnest. Luckily the entrees weren't too big.
I ordered spaghetti with tobiko roe and shiso leaf, the most blatantly Japanese inspired dish on the menu, and liked the buttery flavor of the sauce spiked with the slightly sharp taste of shiso. I also liked the texture of the roe with the firm pasta, although the roe for some reason was kind of sweet. I liked Gerri's spicy spaghetti dish too. The jalapeno taste was mild as you put it in your mouth but intensifies at the back of your mouth as you chew and swallow the noodles. Ruoying's roast duck was nicely rare and juicy and I liked XH's seabass too, although I can't remember too much about it. So entrees were generally well done.
Desserts were also a mix of classic Italian and Asian inspired. I liked XH's hefty slice of tiramisu , generously spiked with coffee and liqeur, a lot. Gerri's coconut panna cotta was so cool and smooth it slides right into your mouth, but we felt that the cantaloupe soup that the panna cotta was swimming in was a little too flavorful and distracted our attention from the mild coconut flavor. I had houji tea icecream, which tastes much like usual green tea icecream, but with a denser and smokier flavor.
We really liked the food and had fun watching the chefs cook in the open-concept kitchen. What we didn't really understand about the restaurant though was the space, which felt very make-shift. With the pictures on the walls and the exposed ceiling, we felt as though the restaurant space could have been an art gallery in the day and converted into the dining room in the evenings by pulling a couple of table and chairs together. Still, it was a comfortable enough room and a great meal to round off a school year.

yeah! shanghai

The Mexicans have their tamales, the Italians raviolis, the Eastern Europeans their pierogis, and of course, the Chinese have dumplings in all shapes and forms. The cantonese have 20 different types of dumplings come dim sum time, while the northerners slurp theirs down by the dozens. And for the shanghainese, nothing but soup dumplings is good enough.
While the soup dumplings at yeah shanghai are not as good as those I've eaten in China and Singapore, they rank among the best in nyc's chinatown. Even though they are not as hefty as the ones at Joe's shanghai, they are a little more refine and the skin quite a bit thinner and not as chewy. The pork is also lean and fresh, which makes the soup residing in the dumpling tasty but not too oily. I once ate 16 dumplings all by myself in Shanghai, but since I eat with people here, I had to restrain myself to two. The act of eating soup dumpling the proper way is so stressful, from transferring it from the bamboo steamer to your spoon gingerly to avoid poking through the delicate skin and losing all tt juicy goodness, to biting slowly and sipping the soup carefully out of the dumpling so that 1) the dumpling will not explode on your and 2) you will not scald your tongue. Given the stress level, i guess that two is manageable. Of course, since you want to eat the dumplings while they're piping hot, its a good idea to share an order instead of hogging the steamer all to yourself.
Besides soup dumplings, the other menu items are also worth ordering, especially the specials listed on the chalkboard, written in Mandarin, for those in the know or who are just lucky enough to know Mandarin. That night, 6 of us had, besides dumplings, fried spinach, a slightly fishy but light fish soup, Tong-Po Pork and a huge plate of crabs with rice cakes. The Tong-Po pork was a special order by Ruoying, who had seen another table of diners order it a couple months ago. She was determined to have it this time, and we were happy to oblige. Who could resist a huge slab of fatty pork braised until the skin and fats literally melt in your mouth? The pork comes with steamed plain buns, so stuff some pork in the bun and you have made yourself the asian variant of hamburger.
The crabs with rice cakes is also worth a mention, even if we didn't really enjoy it. It was tasty no doubt, and the crabs were fat and full of roe. Unfortunately, we had anticipated shredded crab stir-fried into the rice cakes, instead of pieces of crab still in its shell sitting atop a mound of rice cakes and minced pork fried in a thick savory sauce. For our very lazy group, it was too much work to get the meat out of the crab, but if you love the challenge of sucking every ounce of meat stuck in the leg, I urge you to order that dish and eat it to your heart's delight. It is afterall, only $12 dollars. That was the price i paid for my crabcake salad in Maryland for a miserable crabcake. Ever wondered how the Chinese did it with their cheap groceries??

Kunjip

For better or for worse, koreanfever has swept into the rest of Asia since the earlier part of the century and remains extremely strong. I unabashedly proclaim myself a k-drama fan and devour every single dvd set I can get my hands on, happily forgoing sleep and human interaction for the sake of finishing up an episode or five. The most memorable one I've seen so far, and the one that has ruoying wasting away on the couch watching 15 hours non-stop has been Dae Jang Geum. The best part about the show for me, besides the exhibition of office politics in its finest and the epic love story that spans 65 episodes, must be the food. platters and platters of food, from the identifiable congee and bibimbap to the exotic, all fit for a king on celluloid...
so from the land of

May i present to you (cue Dae Jang Geum theme song) dinner, K-style! (aka commoner style, we obviously do not live on the emperor's budget and don't have the great fortune of eating special golden roosters and bear paws and what not...

Yanru's friends are on their grand graduation trip, are spending some time in new york, and would like to try food not easily found in Singapore. It is difficult to find a good korean restaurant in Singapore even though there are more popping out now, with the recent interest in everything that starts with a K. The couple I've been to when I was home left me with a bad taste in my mouth and were too expensive given what they had served up. Y's friends were therefore game to have dinner in manhattan's ktown, and so we made plans to meet up at Kunjip at 7pm.

I love korean food because I'm a big fan of spicy stews, and kunjip does a great job with its spicy chigaes. Well besides being spicy, I guess Korean food can be characterized as a little on the sweet side, and very vege-centric, although we do identify Korean food with BBQ. Kunjip, with its huge menu spanning from vegetarian bibimbaps to spam casserole is a great place to try the full spectrum of basic Korean food. Lastly, walk past kunjip at dinnertime on any day, and you will see a line. There was a line at 6:45 when I got there, and a even longer one at 9 pm, when we left... What instills more confidence than seeing a crowd outside your restaurant of choice? Well, a crowd of native diners, and there were plenty of Koreans waiting in line with us as well, so we were in good hands.

A korean meal always starts off with some side dishes (ban chan), and if you're not too careful, you end up snacking too much and becoming full even before your entree gets here. Kunjip serves up a mean bubbly pot of steamed egg custard, somewhat akin to chawanmushi but without the peripherals and not quite as smooth. Still it's silky and goes down well with kimchi and other preserved veges. The secret must be the hotpot in which it is cooked and served in. Be careful not to be overzealous and burn your tongue while you're at it (which I of course did)

Other stuff we ate:

Seafood pa jeon, the pancake , while a little soggy in the middle, was well-received, and was our only in-your-face deep fried and therefore unhealthy dish.

Sundubu chigae and deon jang chigae: Spicy tofu and spicy miso stews, Sundubu is my all-time favorite korean dish. I also love the fact that tofu = dubu and ma po tofu = mabodubu in korean =)

Nakji Bokum (fried squid in red sauce).. yum yum yum yum yum. The udon that comes with it sops up the go chu jang sauce so well...

A large saba simply broiled with salt... very healthy and tasty but not very photogenic. I think the saba dish was not as popular that night because it was the most tasteless dish, not in a bad way, but because everything else was heavily flavored. It might also be the fact that its just fish and not some unidentifiable korean dish, which would have been more fun to try =)

Last but not least, the piece de resistance, a spicy variation of Gal Bi Jim... Korean beef stew, extra spicy, quite sweet with meat that falls of the bones literally and melts in your mouth. Yanru was not feeling well that day and still couldn't stop eating it. I think its a keeper. Yes there's oil glistening in the photo, but what's a good dish without some healthful beef fats?? And spot the carrots? how's that for a well-balanced meal =)

Since 2004, when I fortuitiously crashed some friends' dinner gathering at Kunjip, I've faithfully returned more than a dozen times, and its been great so far. I've recommended this place to so many people and my roommates both love it too.

So the wait is a little long and service can be brusque, and when they set the food in front of you you feel compelled to scarf everything down in 15 minutes to allow other people still in line to have their turn at ordering, but for some culture and a great meal at under $20 in ktown, where the bakery half a block away is charging $6 for tea, its still my favorite midtown pick!

Kunjip

9 W 32rd St (between 5th and 6th Ave)

crabcakes and cheesecake

Its official... I am the size of a pregnant whale. Ever since Ruoying moved in for the summer two weeks ago, I have steadily been piling on the pounds... soon, I'll need a new wardrobe. Good thing summer sales are around the corner...
I was in Baltimore for 3 days on a conference and in 3 days i visited cheesecake factory twice... and of course loaded myself with a thick slice of cheesecake each time. I adore cheesecake factory! I know.... its a chain, quite like the applebees and olive gardens of the world... But it held good memories for me as a student, where it was our source for good bread, huge basins of pasta and the designated birthday cake supplier back in Chicago. I would say really good things about the place to my family and by the time Ruoying visited Chicago shortly after starting her freshman year, she had given such glowing reports of the restaurant that every family and friend were demanding to be brought there for lunch/dinner/cheesecake break... My sisters and cousins are equally enamored by the place and for our blowout Jay Chou/West Coast/Winter Break holiday, I remembered me choosing to stay where we were in San Francisco based on its proximity to the CAKE (tt's cheesecake factory's ticker! yah yah I'm a nerd) and I also remember us jumping around gleefully but unglamorously in the San Francisco branch, when our beeper finally started vibrating, signalling that after waiting for 90 minutes, there was finally a table open for the 5 of us. We had even bought a whole 7" strawberry cheesecake (349038475 calories) and dug our way through with 5 plastic forks in record time... fun memories those were, although my younger siblings and cousins probably had much higher metabolism rates than i had... sigh... Anyway, I was too disgusted by my lack of self-discipline in Baltimore to even take pictures and remind myself that I actually inhaled about 2000 calories with 2 teeny pieces of cake...
Besides that, I had an utterly unmemorable crabcake salad in a restaurant called J Paul's on Baltimore's inner harbor... Good view of the harbor, but you know what they say about the negative correlation between views and meal satisfaction... Despite not being a fan of crusteceans, I had to order crabcakes, they being Baltimore's proudest invention and contribution to the world... The salad was really not bad, the bibb lettuce was crunchy, but the salad dressing was probably storebought. And the crabcake... I dont think i've eaten enough to judge, but i guess it was fine, but again,I should have listened to my inner gourmet voice and gotten a burger instead.

Better luck next time, if I ever do head back to Baltimore again... Can the next conference be in Chicago please? I'll like some steak and a good slice of deep-dish pizza, thank you very much =)

Les sans culottes

"Do you want to go to yoga with me on friday?" Rosie asked. "Sure, but only if we go out for dinner after that" was my reply... so on friday we had yoga, but my focus was more on the ensuing meal. No wonder my balance was a little off... Anyway, I had wanted to eat korean food but Rosie was more inclined towards something French, and having consulted with Andreea, decided to try les sans culottes, it being french, cheap and close enough from the gym. Besides Rosie and I, Andreea, Yanru and Ruoying also joined in for a night of over-eating.
At around 830, we walked into a busy room, and there wasn't a table large enough to fit the five of us. A couple sitting on the long banquette offered to move so that we could join two tables together, but luckily, it didn't take long before another couple left, leaving us enough room without having to trouble any other patrons into moving for us.
Le sans culottes has a really cheap pre-fixe menu. $22 for appetizers, entrees and dessert... what a deal! Of course the food wasn't very delicate, but its not a fancy shmancy kinda place anyway. So we had a good, hearty meal consisting of crudites, pate and sausage for appetizers, entrees of our choice (all huge platters, and pretty decently, if plainly cooked) and our choice of creme caramel or chocolate mousse.. Andreea broke her diet for dessert, but we all decided it was well worth it... Yanru had dinner before joining us, so she declined to have the whole meal and opted just to get dessert and helped herself to the ample appetizers on the table. More on Yanru's crepe later.
The appetizers were the most gimmicky I've had in a while. Instead of individual salads, we were given a huge basketful of vegetables and fruits, whole apples and tomatos, big slices of cantaloupe and a big chunk of cabbage... we didn't really know what to do with it, since raw cabbage isn't the most appetizing of vegetables. And the three foot sausages came draped on a cage like contraption, like a sausage tree... It looked a little curious looking, and we were slightly put off by the comically grotesque sight in the beginning, but once we got past that, and the thought that many others had handled the sausages with their bare hands before us, we had a lot of fun slicing off the parts we wanted to eat and watched the sausages get shorter and shorter as the night went on.
The entrees were ok, v. filling but nothing to wow about. Rosie complained about the mussels in her pasta being overcooked while there were too many bones in my trout. It tasted a little frozen too, but still pretty tasty.
Desserts were again simple, but pretty tasty. Again, 22 dollars... i will not complain tt there are only two choices of dessert, especially when one is my favorite flan. Yanru decided to get a more substantial dessert off the a la carte menu since she did not order dinner, and got a huge crepe filled with icecream... The owner of the restaurant jokingly brought her crepe out a lot earlier before he brought ours, because he said since she's been waiting patiently for us to finish our meals before getting her own food, its only fair that we should watch her eat now... And the best part about the crepe, besides it being thin warm, and filled with vanilla icecream? it was FREE!!! when was the last time you had something FREE?? the owner decided that Yanru deserved to have a crepe on the house, and he didn't charge her for it! definitely made our day =) So overall, an affordable, fun-filled night with great eating buddies. what more can a cheapskate glutton hope for?
Last curious point about the restaurant. apparently the name stand for "without underwear" and its supposed to have some kind of political connotations to it. If someone would enlighten me that would be very helpful!

Les sans culottes east
2nd Ave, between 57th and 58th st

gimme some dim sum!!

Last weekend, I went out for sunday tea canton style with walt, gerrie and ruoying at the Golden Bridge restaurant in Chinatown. I've never had trouble with the wait for dim sum on saturdays, but sunday, i surmise, is family chow-time... tables of 8, 9, 10, 11, 12... they were all there, the kids, the adults, the grandparents and a random grandaunt here and there... luckily the wait for smaller tables weren't as long and we got seated after 15 minutes. phew...
Can't really remember much about the food, but remembered that it was uniformly good. I think the quality is a lot more uniform than a lot of dim sum palaces in Chinatown, e.g. Jing Fong, Mandarin Court etc. The steamed items were especially well made, although we were very disappointed about the lack of har gows in the menu. We must have been seated too far away from the kitchen, but the time the carts came rolling our way, the popular items (aka har gow) were taken away already. Disappointments about har gow aside, we ate... a. lot.
A sampling of the best golden bridge has to offer:

Weird looking fish.. Chinese style tempura... see the eyes staring right at' cha? Good crunch factor though...

Carrot Cake, crisp on the outside, soft and gooey, chockful of ingredients inside:

Ma lai Kou... my favorite... the tasty factor is unfortunately untranslatable through the photos...

And something others ate... we were too chicken to try:

Clams in the higher bucket and snails in the lower one... yummy, if you like extracting things from shells and then putting it into your mouth...

And in the typical fashion of a v. cost conscious person, i have to report that we spent a grand total of $8.50 each for a tummy-busting lunch... I believe its cheaper than jing fong (my standby dim sum pleasuredome) Other reasons why you should come to golden bridge? 2 simple reasons. 1. the cleanest female bathrooms in the whole of chinatown and 2. the picket line outside the restaurant, made up of former workers demanding unionization and better pay blah blah... We felt a rush defiantly striding past them into the restaurant for lunch... yah yah cheap thrill =)

Golden Bridge Restaurant

50 Bowery St (Canal and Bowery)