Hong Kong

I.

There is a lady of indeterminate age sitting across from me, studiously avoiding my eyes as she transfers her short rib dish from the steamer into her bowl. She raises a disapproving and painted-on eyebrow at the sauce she’s been forced to use after requesting another sauce and being rebuffed.

Or that’s what I assume has happened, since it was all carried out in rapid Cantonese (not that the speed matters when the number of Cantonese words I know is two). Everything has been Cantonese since I arrived at this small dim sum place in an industrial-ish area of Kowloon, purportedly the cheapest Michelin-star-festooned restaurant in the world.

I hear tell of crazy lines and long waits, but I am shuttled in within five minutes, albeit coupled with this strange lady and shown to a tiny table barely big enough to take my jacket off at without knocking all of the silverware on her side into her lap. I smile and nod at her, but she doesn’t look up once. She looks everywhere except at me: at her menu, at the six girls next to us who have so many pork buns on their table that they line the edges like Christmas lights, at the ceiling, at the waitstaff, at the rain.

So I look at my phone. It’s evening in Los Angeles, a reasonable time to text friends, so I text friends. I text them a picture of my menu, because I think that’s what someone at a famous and decorated restaurant might do. I’d just as soon play the game of ‘Who Can Avoid Eye Contact The Longest?’ with my tablemate, who seems vaguely disapproving of my menu-capture, except I have the handicap of facing a wall instead of the rest of the restaurant. Luckily, her shortribs arrive before too long, and I have those to stare at. Dim sum-style short ribs have always tasted somewhat spam-like and looked somewhat pimple-skinned to me, so I haven’t ordered them. I’ve ordered the most white-girl-ish order possible: BBQ pork buns and shrimp dumplings.

To be fair, the BBQ pork buns are what everyone raves about – otherwise, I wouldn’t have ordered them. Tim Ho Wan’s pork buns are the fried, crispy kind. The kind with sugar poured on top in a kind of bun-ruining splat. The filling of the buns is fantastic, though not terribly Chinese-tasting – the BBQ sauce wouldn’t be totally out of place at a Texas rib joint – but the sugar-splatted bun is reminiscent of the first time I bought a loaf of bread in Indonesia and discovered that apparently Indonesians think bread, even in loaf form is dessert. (I tried to make a grilled tempeh and mustard sandwich with it. This didn’t go well.) If I was writing a judgment-free review of these sugar buns, though, I’d have to admit that the sugar forms a teeth-pleasing crunch, like the top of a creme brulée, to supplement the rest of the crackling, fried, crumb-flaking bun. But these, sugar and crunch and Texas BBQ sauce and all, are but a mere memory once I put a shrimp dumpling in my mouth.

These shrimp dumplings are first example of something I run into time and time again in Hong Kong: there is something magical in the rice wrappers. I’ve been eating dim sum all my life – in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Beijing, in Guangxi, even in Osaka – and never knew the wrappers didn’t have to be at least kind of gummy. I never even noticed the gumminess until its absence here in Hong Kong, where the rice wrappers serve their purpose by holding in the goodies, provide a mild chew, then magically disintegrate into nothing when they’re no longer needed. Once the shrimp’s skin bursts and that salty ocean flavor, tempered by wine, garlic, and pork fat, floods the mouth, the wrapping just disappears as though it was never there. It wouldn’t want to interfere.

I see this here, at Tim Ho Wan; I see it in the green glass dumplings at Sai Yung Kee, which LOOK fat and substantial, but melt all the same; I see it at Mak’s Noodle, a no-nonsense diner where the only hint to its fame is the laminated newspaper write-ups stuck under the glass of the tables (and the presence of a branch at the Peak Galleria, but I don’t know that yet).

Mak’s Noodle does a lot of things right other than the magical disappearing wonton wrapper. Its saltwater prawn dumpling/pork-wood ear mushroom wonton/egg noodle soup tastes enough like the soups I had in American-Chinese restaurants all throughout my childhood (but not since) to make me feel familiar with it, but tastes dissimilar enough to feel like an adventure. The skinny clumps of egg noodles, for example, are made fresh with duck eggs, and are a departure from those tangled nothings you find dried in grocery stores. And the broth, said to be made from flounder, pork bones, and dried shrimp, goes so far beyond the normal weakly five-spiced chicken/MSG water as to be a different species entirely.

The tiny bowl disappears too fast. I’d been waiting all morning for it to open, erroneously assuming Hong Kongers eat noodle soup for breakfast just as the Vietnamese and Cambodians do, opening their pho, hu tieu, kuy teav, and nom banh chok stalls as early as 6am. But Mak’s opens at 11, leaving me wandering through the bizarre K11 Art Mall with my stomach growling as I observe blocky birds flying through the entry way, fluorescent mosaic exit doors, and graffitied understairwells. I keep out of the rain under building-sized plastic shower curtains and, while still lukewarm on Hong Kong as a whole, wish we museumed our malls like this.

II.

“Is that… gold?” I ask incredulously as I use the end of a chopstick to lift the tiny, but unmistakable sparkle away from its off-purple base pile of paste.

The concerned but smiling face above me inclines towards the paste. “You should try that before you mix it. Just to make sure you like it.”

“The crab paste?” I know it’s crab paste, because I read the menu. I already know I like crab paste. But to accommodate him, I taste the crab paste. “Mmm. I like it. But… is that…?”

“Good!” he exclaims as he glides off towards the end of the miniscule bar to grab another customer’s tray of soup, which may or may not also feature a tiny speck of gold leaf atop a mountain of crab paste.

The bowl in front of me looks tangentially like the ramen I’m used to, but for the gold leaf and the fact that the broth is bleeding black from a shot of squid ink. Nobody thinks the fact that there is gold in the soup is weird, and upon further reflection, neither should I, given that I’m in Hong Kong, a city which appears to have more people than square feet and more jewelry stores than people.

My Kowloon hostel sat on a block with at least seven of them, several of them clones, despite the congested apartment blocks rising from those ground floors where people all lived jumbled on top of one another, their incense wafting into each other’s windows, the laundry on their lines fluttering against one another’s, their drying foodstuffs clogging the hallways, and their elevators sagging and clunking with illegal loads. Where are the people who are keeping these jewelry stores in business?

The gold leaf is decoration, of course, like gold anything, and goes down without comment or fanfare. The ramen, similarly, is more pomp than substance. While the squid ink bleeds dramatically, oil-like, into the pork bone broth, the whole thing tastes vaguely of iron. I muse in the background of my bites that I shouldn’t have mixed in the crab paste, that I should have eaten the whole pile of it in one mouthful.

The whole time I’m eating, the waiter and I are having a spirited conversation about what the best countries in the world to live in are (him: Germany; me: Taiwan) that takes a left turn into autism when he asks what I do. We speak easily. But when he asks me whether I like my bowl, I turn shy. “It’s interesting!” I say, as though that isn’t code for “Please don’t make me state an unequivocal opinion!”

“I can tell,” he replies, but I, for one, can’t tell whether he’s saying he can tell I like it or can tell I’m lying.

Secret Samlar

Every time I eat samlar (Cambodian soup) – any kind of samlar! – I love it so much, and find it so seductively mysterious, that I go into a kind of starry-eyed research haze and forget how to appropriately speak to Google. I ask Google questions like it’s Ask Jeeves: (“Why is Cambodian soup so good?” “What are the ingredients of samlar machu?” etc).

And Google, tolerant as usually it is of Ask-Jeeves-phrased questions, gives me a mere smattering! Nobody (in the English speaking world) seems to know much about Cambodian soup. I mean, Google actually tried to auto fill “Why is Cambodian soup so…” with the words “poor”, “corrupt”, and “low”. I mean, really? People are asking why their soup is corrupt, but I have to dig deep into the bowels of the internet to find out why samlar machu, despite having exactly the description of tom yum on most menus, is so much more delicious to me than tom yum? Or why samlar korko hasn’t supplanted chili as the stew-at-barbecues of choice, with its sweet-potato-esque kabocha, thick meaty eggplant slices, and fat-lined pork ribs?

Cambodian soups – at least any one of them individually, but certainly all as a group – should have at least the following of pho. At least. There should be samlar-spiced sandwich trucks plying DTLA. (There’s wordplay in there somewhere.) Kabocha and toasted rice powder should be showing up as a topping on tacos. Blanched banana blossoms and lemongrass would make a pretty good vegetarian burrito filling, come to think of it.

What shocks me almost as much as the fact that the above isn’t real life is the fact that I never wrote about any of the soups I ate in Cambodia, while I was actually in Cambodia. I remember feeling smiled upon by the gods of culinary luck every time I sat down at some blue-tarped roadside restaurant, pointed at an indecipherable jumble of Khmer script, and was served some wondrous, vegetable-filled mystery broth full of fish so fresh from the river it was practically sweet, but I never wrote about it! This was probably because I had no idea what I was tasting, and could not, therefore, put words to experiences. How was I supposed to describe bowlfuls of total unfamiliarity? Especially when the photos were so uninspiring, sometimes containing my finger and always not doing the taste justice?

Long Beach, luckily, is stuffed much fuller than almost any other American city with Cambodian restaurants. In fact, it contains the largest Cambodian community outside of Cambodia. I touched on some of these restaurants in this entry, but only briefly skirted the topic of soup, paying homage to a cloudy tamarind-leaf fish soup at Crystal Thai-Cambodian Restaurant. Since then, I’ve fallen in love with the samlar korko (kabocha/pork rib/eggplant/roasted rice) at the same place, and the samlar machu (sour soup with ginger and lemongrass) and the trey andaing (“farmer’s” catfish/banana blossom soup) at Monorom Cambodian Restaurant, a few blocks over and one block higher.

I ordered the trey andaing alone, and the waitress warned me: “You will need to take some home!” (Yeah yeah, I’m used to that, I’ve been to Korea-the-country and Korea-the-town-in-LA, where it is assumed that everyone is a championship eater and has banchan-pouches in the sides of their stomachs.) It came out perched atop a solitary but blistering flame, the stream of steam from the fire making me sweat profusely, adding to the authenticity of it all, just like being in Cambodia. The banana flower, blanched pure white, nothing like its oniony Vietnamese cousins that curl in bun bo hue, was soft, rather like bamboo, and sliced like noodles. Shavings of lemongrass drifted along like bonito flakes, occasionally catching on some circles of ginger that, when accidentally bitten, would flood and reset my tastebuds.

And the fish in it… now, I like catfish, but it tends to taste, unmistakably, like catfish: kind of a dirty, bottomfeedery, pungent, I-eat-mud-for-breakfast kind of thing. This fish, purportedly catfish, tasted nothing like that. It tasted clean, for all the world like it had just been fished out of the Mekong, even though that would have been impossible from 7000 miles away. What it tasted like, in actuality, was snakehead: this pure, clean, cloudlike white flavor and texture.

This flavor was perhaps the only flavor in the whole soup that could have been called mild. The rest of it was stinky and bold. The shrimp were skin-on, tiny, and sweet, but strong. There was a whole sac of fish roe just hanging out and falling apart all over everything. Prahok, the omnipresent Cambodian fermented mudfish that makes even Vietnamese purple shrimp paste taste tame in comparison, provided the whole bowl with an undercurrent of funkiness that mingled with the scent of the flame under the soup (Prahok, in all honesty, is probably the answer to the question I pose above about why Cambodian soup isn’t more popular. The first time I came to this restaurant, roughly two years earlier, my dining companion whispered from behind his cupped hand that my lunch smelled ‘like gorilla farts’. I guess I like gorilla farts!)

I took a larger group back two weeks later for what I hoped would be a soup crawl, and we did get try two new soups: Monorom’s version of samlar korko and the samlar machu. The machu was ordered despite my protestations – I can’t stomach tom yum, which, like I mentioned above, machu is a cousin to – but the whole table loved it, and so, astonishingly, did I. The same sweet, globe-traveling fish floated around in the clear yet bitingly astringent ginger/lemongrass/citrus broth. It was coated, blanketlike, in tons of morning glory leaves. As though the tom yum aversion weren’t enough to try and turn me off of this soup, I also am not crazy about morning glory leaves, because one time I had a plate of them in Chengdu that were so heavily coated with Sichuan peppercorn that I couldn’t feel my throat for hours and thought I was dying. But even with that working against it, I still loved this soup. How could I not? It was more refreshing than lemonade.

The samlar korko was less well-received by the table, and even I had to admit that Crystal Thai-Cambodian does it better. But there’s something I love about the gritty texture of the toasted rice powder, coating everything like a dry spice rub, and how the kabocha tastes like a lighter version of pumpkin. There’s also something charmingly down-to-earth about how it’s impossible to eat the ribs without plucking them out of your spoon by hand and gnawing at them like you’re sitting around a fire 10000 years ago. I do wish they weren’t overcook them, though. (Something I notice about Cambodian food – both here in the States and in Cambodia – is that they tend to cook their fish to flaky, cloudlike perfection, but turn their meat into a woody, tough [albeit wonderfully spiced and fat-coated] mess. Monorom’s beef lok lak is another example of that. Oh well. Nobody’s perfect.

While I still have a long way to go working my way down menus of mystery samlar, I would love it if anyone shared with me a site that has good recipes. There’s an adorable youtube channel that consists entirely of videos of someone’s Grandma cooking delicious-looking dishes, but then suddenly – in every recipe – “chicken flavor soup base mix”! I don’t mind it if I don’t know it (more like I CAN’T mind) but I’m not going to use it myself. I’d feel like I was cheating.

Senses Smothered By Sheep

The first time China fed me some form of sheep was the very first day China ever saw me. I landed in Xi’an, Shaanxi, an odd city for a first-time tourist to cut her China-teeth on. It’s located in the center of the country and is noted mainly for its exhibition of terracotta warriors, which are showcased miles out of the city in their own warehouse and surrounding park.

The city itself was hot and grimy, and the air so bad I couldn’t see the ground from a tenth story window. We were at a hospital waiting for my boyfriend’s mom to get a couple root canals (PSA: China is not a good place for dental tourism), and I kept looking doubtfully out the window at how the air just slowly seemed to thicken until it became indistinct and yellowish-gray. It was like living in a cloud… a cloud of exhaust. A seasoned veteran of Los Angeles, I thought I’d seen pollution. I hadn’t.

When I got hungry, I thought we’d eat whatever the Chinese equivalent of hospital cafeteria food was; we were in sort of an industrial, restaurantless area. Instead, I was led outside onto the street, where the back of the parking lot of the hospital had been converted into what in the U.S. would totally count as a night market; sweating men and women, the lower halves of their faces covered in cloth, fanned at thick smoke billowing off a multitude of hot grills. Nearby, more vendors chopped fruit and scooped it into bags.

The grills, and whatever was on them, didn’t look immediately appetizing. The way the air was, thick and heavy, created an illusion that the smoke from the grills was what was creating the ambient haze. I didn’t feel like eating whatever caused me to feel like I was living in an exhaust-cloud city. Plus, it was hot, and the grills were hot. I wanted the cut fruit.

And I did get the cut fruit (watermelons mixed with carrots – weird), but my boyfriend insisted I also get what was on the grills, which turned out to be mutton skewers. This popular street food, ubiquitous in all parts of China but best-tasting, I think, in the western half, consists of mutton chunks skewered through and brushed with chili sauce, dried chilies, cumin, and salt. They’re handed to you scorching, so the experience has to begin with the smell, which is rich and spicy. Oil drips dangerously down the skewer towards your hand if you hold it too vertically, so you have to be careful with your angle. Once it’s cooled down enough to touch, you get the cumin first, a light coating all over your tongue, then the most explosive, fatty, gamey flavor. I don’t know why Chinese mutton and lamb tastes so much gamier than American mutton and lamb – whether it’s diet, the amount of fat left on, or the cooking method – but the difference is as big as if they were two different animals.

The second time China fed me sheep was in the prettier and much more touristy Muslim quarter, in a second floor cafe that looked like a converted shed draped in tapestry. I ordered yangrou paomo, a thick lamb broth filled with torn bits of bread and fat-streaked lamb chunks. It was delicious – rich and so gamey it felt like the used the essence of hundreds of sheep to make it – but regrettably so heavy I had to haul my stomach home and resume my Muslim Quarter culinary tour the next day.

I’ve never been able to find mutton skewers in Los Angeles exactly like they make them in China. I’ve tried. Most Angelenos will point you towards Feng Mao Mutton Kebab in Koreatown, but I find their version heavy on the gristle and light on the fat, and their staff way too trusting of patrons to cook their own skewers. You’re the experts, not me! If I could grill my own mutton skewers, I would – at home. Anyway, I think Omar’s Xinjiang Halal in San Gabriel comes much closer. In my own Yelp review I wrote that they got it ‘to the note’, but I was speaking comparatively. American restaurants are just too scared to embrace the fat. However, if you want to get as close as you’re going to get, go to Omar’s and make sure you order them with the garlicky cucumber salad.

I HAVE, however, been able to find gamey, lamby, pickled-garlicky replicas of Xi’an style lamb soup in the Los Angeles area, one with torn-up bread as the base and one with wide, hand-cut-and-stretched wheat noodles.

The torn-up bread version comes from Rainbow Bridge, a Ningxia province specialty restaurant in Irvine. The bread chunks here are perfect little tiny crouton-like squares. (I have no idea how they get them so uniform. Mechanical bread separator?) They cause the soup, at first glance, to resemble a bowl of white Legos. But they rapidly slurp up the thick cloudy broth and turn into puffy Legos with indistinct edges that, upon contact with your tongue, become lamb bombs. The experience of placing a spoonful of those in your mouth is not unlike placing a xiao long bao in your mouth, in terms of the shocking spurt of meat essence it releases. And if the lambiness of the bread isn’t enough, there are also hunks of lamb, almost appropriately fat-streaked, sitting in little wood-ear mushroom beds and wearing leek hats. The overall effect is added to by a pervasive taste/smell of pickled garlic; I’m not sure if this is because it was actually used for cooking or because the little plate of it next to my bowl was sending aromas wafting up to mix up my senses.

The noodly version comes from Xi’an Tasty in Monterey Park. Speaking of noodles, I think the noodles in this broth are secretly just one 20 foot long noodle. While attempting to serve ourselves, we kept unspooling and unspooling these monster noodles, splattering broth all over the table and the floor and our shirts in the process, trying to reach the end. Eventually, we ended up meeting in the middle. Usually, in situations like this, Chinese restaurants will offer scissors, but I think in this case they judged that the value of getting to laugh at us was greater than the value of satisfied customers with scissors. (Just kidding, our waitress was above-and-beyond sweet.)

The broth here is less aggressively gamey and garlicky than Rainbow Bridge’s, but mostly because it tastes like it may get a slight moderation from chicken broth. The lamb here is more tender, and falls apart at the first feather touch from a fork. The real fun of it, though, is the Mobius strip monster noodle. It’s so substantial it may as well be a rope of bread.

If getting your senses smothered in the essence of sheep sounds like a good time to you, northwestern China is the place for you, but in the meantime, Los Angeles, as always, at least approximates.

An Acquired Taste

Sometimes my sense of personal identity rewrites history. It has a such a strong sense of itself – myself – as an experimental eater that it assumes that Childhood Me constantly sought out new flavors, just like Current Me. It also takes Current Me’s negative attitude toward artificial flavors, sweeteners, and overly processed foods and extends them backwards, systematically wiping out memories of Childhood Me storing sour blue Warheads in her cheeks, begging her mom to buy Spaghetti-O’s, surviving all the way until seventh period lunch on daily cans of Dr. Pepper, and only being able to cook frozen dinners from age 16-20.

Recently I was talking to my mom about kids’ menus. I was (am) angry that they existed, because I thought (think) that catering to kids’ dumb preferences for boring, processed food both creates and reinforces such preferences, turning kids into Outback Steakhouse-seeking, Campbell’s soup-heating, Hard Rock Cafe-touring adults. “I never ate from a kids menu, did I?” I asked her confidently, sure I knew the answer already.

“Of course you did,” she responded, without even stopping to think. “You pretty much lived on bean and cheese burritos whenever we went to Mexican restaurants.”

Because I can’t conceive of making that choice now, I can’t conceive of having been the person who ever would have made that choice. I remember the parts of my childhood where I ate fish eyes on a dare, brought cream cheese and caviar sandwiches to preschool, and was the only kid in my group of friends to have tried sushi. I remember those things because those things fit with my narrative: that of the adventurous kid, becoming an adventurous eating evangelist.

Kids’ menus fit nowhere in that narrative. I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to them. When I’m sitting at a restaurant with an otherwise beautiful varied menu that chooses to offer children chicken fingers or a grilled cheese sandwich, I think, what is the message we’re sending here? Is it really that we’re catering to an inherently picky demographic whose tastebuds biologically prefer blandness? Or are we creating a false picky demographic by making that assumption?

This article argues that American children’s bland tastes were artificially created by an 1894 book called ‘The Care and Feeding of Children’, which was heavily referenced when kids’ menus came into existence during prohibition. The book claimed that fresh fruit, pastries, salty meats, lemonade, and other ‘fancy’ foods were to be reserved for adults. Prior to the publication of this book, which came as part of a larger scientific movement and era promoting different nutritional requirements for children, kids ate what adults ate.

But you can’t make the case that kids’ bland preferences aren’t wholly manufactured out of thin air. Children do have more tastebuds than adults (because adults’ tastebuds eventually stop regenerating) and so food tastes stronger to them. Basically, they’re supertasters. (Parenthetically, I know a self-proclaimed supertaster and she hates almost all ‘healthy’ food, and especially all vegetables.) Children also are programmed, as toddlers, to crave fat and sugar to gain energy and to avoid bitterness, which could have signaled poison back in ancient times when they were running around shoving unfamiliar plants from the forest into their mouths.

Why, then, do some children eat kimchi and borscht and carrots and peppers, while others subsist on foods marketed specifically for them, like chicken nuggets and mashed potatoes and fruit roll-ups? I’m pulling the lens back from the United States here: remember that set of photos that circulated early last year that showed what school lunches were like around the world? Here it is. Take a look. I can’t argue that these kids aren’t eating differently from their parents, as I’m not an expert on each type of cuisine pictured, but I can certainly argue that almost none of the international foods pictured in this set are as bland or texturally unchallenging as the American food pictured. Korea’s unsurprisingly, prominently features kimchi. That, plus Finland’s pickled beet and carrot salads and Greece’s vinegared dolmas, prove that acidity is not a dealbreaker for young palates, as the U.S. so often assumes it is by cutting out certain salad dressings or forgoing sharp sauces. Brazil’s bed of fresh arugula, Spain’s cut fresh peppers, and Ukraine’s cabbage show that raw veggies aren’t a no-go either, and that veggies don’t have to be boiled to mush to be enjoyed by children. And I mean, Ukraine features borscht. What could be more stereotypically offensive to most American children than a cold mushy soup made out of beets? What are other countries doing differently?

My guess (and this needs more research to substantiate) is that most other cultures don’t conceive of children’s palates and needs as a separate entity than the adults’; they simply, as in pre-1890’s America – make kids eat what the adults eat. This doesn’t mean that kids aren’t universally more particularly about what they are willing to try. I mean, the phrase ‘an acquired taste’ isn’t just something that appeared, baseless, out of thin air. Adventurousness seems not ingrained but earned, either through necessity (“there’s nothing else to eat!”) or a certain maturity (“this is going to be at least an interesting/broadening experience, and maybe I’ll even like it!”).

The former is foisted upon children by parents who take the approach of feeding their children what they themselves are eating: no other option. If the children don’t like it, the children go hungry. Eventually, they learn.

The latter comes – only sometimes – with age. I’d argue that children who are forced to experience the former are more likely to become the types of adults who reach the latter. While I don’t know anyone who sprang from the womb inherently frightened of ‘weird’ food like duck fetuses or pig’s blood, I also don’t know anyone who has overcome society’s judgments enough to try those things, preconceived notions firmly inculcated, without a little bit of gritting teeth and encouraging self-talk. Sometimes gritting teeth and encouraging self-talk is necessary to reach a point where a new food is fully appreciated and integrated into a diet! Personally, I had to pry apart a duck fetus with a fork until it didn’t resemble a bird anymore before I could eat balut for the first time; I didn’t know that the usual method involves scooping it out with a spoon, eyes averted or shut. I had to get over the fact that pig’s blood tasted like swallowing a mouthful of saliva after getting punched. Now I eat both things happily, because I appreciate the mingling of the flavors they often accompany: pate and Vietnamese coriander and salt and lime; iron and oxtail and lemongrass.

I feel my life would be less rich if not for these experiences, and I worry that American kids are being set up for a life of predictability when they’re not expected to cultivate an attitude of openness and curiosity towards food. I realize how pretentious this sounds, but it doesn’t change how I feel.

Everyday Eating

If you fall too deeply into the vortex of food writing, it starts to seem like everyone in the world is consistently subsisting on rakishly tilted sliders hand-shaped from some kind of nontraditional meat, cute salads of citrus and cured raw fish, street tacos from the window of a brand new truck, five-country-fusion in a ‘pop-up’ in some insider’s living room, or new artisanal goat cheeses from the farmers market. Nobody ever seems to eat anything pedestrian, or merely tasty, without being… momentous, or noteworthy in some way. We know they do, of course, but it’s not getting written about, so in the collective foodie consciousness, everything mundane or everyday simply ceases to exist.

In real life, though, non-noteworthy meals definitely exist. We don’t go out for every meal. We come home late and throw things in a pot, or in the microwave, or even, if things get dire, open a crinkly bag.

So what do we food-obsessives eat when we’re not ‘on’? What do we crave when we know it won’t go into an article or be recommended to a friend? What’s our comfort food, our most dog-eared recipe? What do we always restock when we go to the grocery store?

Yes, I’m asking you!

The question feels almost intrusive, like asking to see a someone’s underwear drawer. But I think it says a lot about the way our taste buds differ before we deliberately twist them to try and like things that are new or experimental or ‘in’.

I’m not knocking the deliberate twisting of tastebuds here. (Obviously; my entire blog promotes the willingness to do this.) Some of my favorite foods were acquired by the deliberate twisting of tastebuds. I learned to like olives by stolidly continuing to eat them, forcing them past my gag reflex, until they suddenly, beautifully, morphed into the slick, rich, pungent, and delicious morsels they are. I put them in hummus regularly now, and will suck up olive tapenade at work events like a vacuum cleaner. Similarly, I balked at pork blood jelly for a long time, until I realized bun bo hue was an obstacle course of bones and cartilage without its silky texture. I’m currently trying very hard to like celery by slowly incorporating it into juice.

But when I’m not eating to expand my boundaries or as research? When I’m tired and revert to the comfortable?

For dinner, at least once a week, I have a salad concoction that’s like a deconstructed California roll without the krab. Sushi rice, cucumber, carrot, avocado, sesame seeds, shredded seaweed, soy, wasabi. Sometimes I’ll use kimchi, fish roe, and sesame leaves instead of the cucumber, carrot, and avocado. If I’m feeling really fancy I’ll get some raw fish and make it poke-esque. But boy, do I love vaguely Asian rice salads when I’m feeling like not making a big production about food!

I also like fancy potato chips (there are 8 bags in my pantry, with flavors ranging from dill pickle to horseradish-cheddar), granola (noun) so, well, granola (adjective), that it’s unsweetened and made in small batches in an unmarked storefront by an unsmiling hippie, grapes (they’re my M&M’s), eggs on the exact line between hard- and soft-boiled, impossibly oily eggplant/tofu stir fry, and candied ginger, which I eat by the handful.

What do you subsist on that you never write – or talk – about?

Taiwan: Above the Undercurrent

I went to Taiwan – yes, that Taiwan, the Taiwan guidebooks and mainstream food websites and niche food websites and travel blogs galore lose their minds over – over the Thanksgiving week in 2015, and never wrote about it.

It wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy it, or because I found everything too thoroughly explored already by others (though the latter is certainly an excuse I’d make). It was because I had this nagging feeling, even as I gorged on new-to-me things like egg-yolk-taro balls or oyster omelets or mystery shells stuffed with cheese or sausages stuffed with other sausages – that I was barely grazing the surface of what Taiwan had to offer. Beneath the seething mass of street stalls and teenagers, I felt there was an undercurrent, a base even, of a more careful culinary tradition that I wouldn’t be able to break into unless I traveled with a group of people. Better yet, a group of people who spoke the language (one of Taiwan’s three main ones, anyway).

I didn’t have a group. This trip was singularly solitary. I traveled around Taipei and the countryside alone, looking mesmerizedly out of the windows of trains and buses and mountain gondolas. There was a four day stretch where I used my vocal chords for less than 3 collective minutes per day. I loved it.

But when it came to dining, my chosen solitude and imposed linguistic ignorance limited me. It caused me to mainly mill around night markets, where I could assess visually what was on offer, point at what I wanted without using words, and enjoy my choice in single-serving sizes, sitting alone. Sometimes the food was on a stick, sometimes in a tiny paper bowl, sometimes in a bag. I got to eat it standing up, sitting on a curb, sitting in a park, or on my way to the metro. Occasionally I got snapped at if I tried to order something ridiculously small, like one egg-yolk taro ball (“minimum two!”) or a single skewer of cumin-rubbed mutton (“minimum three!”) but for the most part I was able to keep my portions small enough that I got to sample five or six different stands for each dinner.

Now, given the option, this is usually how I prefer to eat. I touched on the topic in my entry on Spain. I don’t go in for pomp and circumstance and decor and ambience and service and plating very often. I’m happier with my butt planted on a curb, eating out of a box, watching the world go by.

But as I sat, butt planted, world-watching, enjoying my bites, I knew that inside all the buildings with the indecipherable lettering, there were families and groups of friends sitting around tables enjoying a cuisine that was very different from my seafood sticks and grilled meats. I got a tiny taste of this wandering down Yongkang St one day, when I saw a restaurant that both had pictures of its menu items on the wall and looked relatively fancy. (Sadly, Taiwan largely lacks the Korean and Japanese tradition of molding plastic versions of their dishes to display outside the door.) I took this as the golden opportunity that it was, pointing excitedly at the picture of what looked like an entire bowl filled with shell-less oysters, plus a plate of mystery greens and stalks covered in what may have been either sesame or peanut powder.

I got the last seat in the restaurant. The other tables were full of groups, passing delectable-looking dishes back and forth or spinning them around on the tables’ Lazy Susans. They took chopstickfuls of food from the common plate and thoughtfully chewed – more thoughtfully than most do when they are also chatting. I saw the food arrest them, momentarily tear them away from their conversations. There was no mindless chewing or hurried swallowing between shouted sentences like, I don’t know, most American sports bars, for example. The food held a presence equal to another guest at the table.

When I received my bowl of oysters, it was large, with a bathtub-warm broth that softened its sticks of ginger and furls of seaweed. The oysters were a pillowy mess of ocean, and though it initially seemed crazily decadent to eat an entire bowlful of oysters without having to work to get them out of their shells, I finished them with little trouble or guilt. They were tiny sweet morsels with not a rotten one in the bunch. And the mystery greens, which I found out a month later from Yelper Karen L. were sweet potato leaves, collected just the right amount of bonito dew from their own warm broth. The powder on top was sesame, and somehow stayed dry and out of the path of the dew. The stalks crunched, but the leaves collapsed under my tongue.

This meal was the best in Taiwan, and worth every penny of the maybe $12 (US) it cost, but having it made me realize how much I was missing. For every restaurant with photos, there were twenty without, and who knew what lay within them? Having spent much of my life with a vegetarian boyfriend, I’m familiar with the feeling of loss that comes when I find myself in a restaurant with a family-style meat dish – Beijing duck, Sichuan whole fish, Tibetan yak stew – that I’d never be able to tackle on my own. But since that vegetarian boyfriend spoke Chinese, I had not yet experienced the loss of being a linguistic outsider and not even knowing what was on offer.

I wished there had been (or I’d sought out) a Taiwanese version of that couple who takes tourists around Saigon on motorbikes and has them eat snails and shellfish and goat.

So, my memories of Taiwan are fond, but consist mostly of slices of night market life. Watching a man scoop fried squid out of a steamy metal bucket, wondering at its crunch and how it retained it with all the steam.

Choosing between five varieties of egg custard – flecked with sesame seeds, swirled with burnt caramel, topped with cream cheese.

Discovering street sushi that reminded me of a Japanese festival in Orange County. Eating something that was either intestines or penis while a crowd gathered to closely await my reaction.

Smelling the combined smoke of hundreds of of pieces of smoldering meat and letting the background noise coalesce into a hum.

Next time, I’m bringing a Chinese speaker, so that hum distills into connection.

Authenticity

If you run an ‘ethnic’ restaurant, authenticity is gold. Foodies strive for it as an ideal placed somewhere beyond ambrosia or the fountain of youth.

You see this all the time in restaurant reviews:

“I’m from [country], so I know [country-ese food], and this place [does/doesn’t] measure up.”

“I took a trip to [country] last year and this place’s [specific regional dish] is [exactly/nothing] like what I had in [specific region].”

“This place is the best [country-ese food] in town, aside from my grandmother’s cooking, of course!”

It also crops up in how people automatically discount Chinese restaurants full of white people. (I’m not judging; even as a white person, I do this.) Also in the tendency to disparagingly remark that one’s sushi or luleh kabob or panang curry or whatever is being made/assembled by Mexicans. (I AM judging this. I think it’s racist. Don’t extend your judgment of the authenticity of food to a judgment of the authenticity of a person.)

Why are we so obsessed with authenticity, even sometimes over flavor?

I started considering this question way back in 2012, when I had mì quảng in Huế, Vietnam, for the first time. This was not the first time I’d had mì quảng; I was introduced to it in Orange County. So for me, I found myself in the odd position of comparing my Vietnamese (Huế-ian) mì quảng served right off a local family’s back porch, to the ‘ideal’ of Ngự Bình Restaurant’s mi quang. Obviously, the mì quảng from the source – Huế – was more authentic, and should have served as the anchor of reference.

Here’s the thing, though, and this is where cognitive dissonance started creeping in – I didn’t like the Huế version as much. It was just not as flavorful or complex. The noodles were white, rather than the turmeric-sunny yellow I was used to, and the shrimps were tiny, red, and a little mealy. The crackers, usually sesame filled, were airy and tasted like puffed rice, and the pork meat was tougher and seemed unmarinated.

But in terms of authenticity, it scored an A+. I was nowhere near the tourist areas of Huế. I was in a field, actually down an alley, having followed a handwritten cardboard sign that said ‘My Quảng’. I was on a Vietnamese family’s porch while women crouched nearby peeling and chopping vegetables and pounding fish into paste. It was a hundred degrees and my whole body was dripping with sweat. The only sounds were the sounds of peeling, pounding, motorcycle horns, and bugs buzzing. And of course, I was squatting on a miniscule plastic stool.

But Ngự Bình’s mi quang tasted better.

You’re probably thinking, “well, maybe this wasn’t a good restaurant, and you could have found a better incarnation elsewhere.” Undoubtedly that is true, although I have to say I ended up trying it three or four more times in different areas in Vietnam and still liked the Little Saigon versions better. But it doesn’t matter. What’s ‘better’? What is the incarnation that’s the most true to form? What is the version that stays true to the original? Do we just choose the one that tastes the best and is from the closest area to the region it’s supposed to be from?

Do we then discriminate against versions that have improved upon the original, as measured by terms as simple (and yet unmeasurable and indescribable) as ‘tastiness’?

I’m not talking about fusion cuisine here, which is alive and kicking and maybe even dominating and spreading, so it’s clear that combining ‘the original’ with ingredients and twists from wholly different areas of the globe is totally fine with foodies. I’m talking more about the ability to source a wider variety of vegetables and herbs in California and thus being able to combine fresh mint and banana flower and cilantro and lettuce and green onions and turmeric and chilies in one bowl. Even if that’s not always possible in mì quảng’s home country, should California do it? It may be making it less authentic by carrying it further away from the source, but it’s sure tasty.

My opinion? I’m glad we do it. I’m glad cooks take advantage of their location and connections to make their dishes taste even better than the version they grew up with or remember. I’m as guilty as anyone of comparinglocal versions of foreign dishes to their ‘home’ counterpart, but that’s usually because I’m trying to paint an evocative picture of what the dish is like when you order it where it ‘lives’. Putting taste aside, it’s an utterly different experience eating, say, lamb hand-pulled noodle soup in a scorching, noisy, side street of the Muslim Quarter of Xi’an and eating lamb hand-pulled noodle soup in a sterile, almost banquet-hall-like second-floor restaurant above a grocery store in suburban Los Angeles. The second setting isn’t interesting. We all know what that’s like, and even though that is what the reader will be literally experience should s/he choose to heed the reviewer’s call and go to the restaurant, s’he’d rather hear about what it WOULD be like if s’he were in Xi’an.

Sometimes I think authenticity is so highly prized because we’re all trying to turn our backyards into mini-vacations. We want to feel, even though we just drove a little way up the 405, like we’re ‘there’, wherever ‘there’ is. We want to close our eyes and have traveled thousands of miles. And we’re willing to fool ourselves a little to do it.

11/30,000

I read recently in a wholly un-food-related book that although there are 30,000 edible plants on our planet, only 11 plants account for 93% of the plants we eat. Then I immediately dropped the book and got on the internet.

Is there a list of those 30,000 plants somewhere? How do we know about them all? Are they all actively eaten by someone, somewhere, or are they all just theoretically edible in the sense that they wouldn’t kill us?

And where/when can I start eating my way through them?

I’m into plant food. As far as animals unconventionally used for food go, I’m rarely blown away by any difference in the taste of meat alone. The whole ‘it tastes like chicken’ thing may be overly simplistic, but in my heart of hearts, that’s kind of how I feel. Frog tastes like slippery, somewhat fishy chicken. Rabbit tastes like diluted dark meat chicken. Ostrich tastes like beefy chicken. Even though I’m a gamey-meat-lover, I haven’t found something that gets to my umami receptors quite like a good fat-coated hunk of mutton or goat – the more ‘exotic’ venison and bison included.

When I’m excited about the taste of something it’s usually because it’s either seafood or a particularly unique blend of spices. Even sea snails, which I tend to write about as though they’re infallible, don’t excite me without some tamarind sauce, or at the very least some chili salt, lemon, and Vietnamese coriander. I love po’ boys because of the Cajun coating on the shrimp, larb because of the dry-ricey, limey, strongly minted rub, amok trey because of the lemongrass-scented coconut milk, and hot pot because of the Sichuan peppercorn.

None of the plants I mentioned are in the top 11. Well, other than the wheat needed to make the bread on the po’ boy, the cornstarch in the coating used to deep-fry the shrimp, the rice needed to rub the larb, possibly whatever kind of oil is used to fry/stir-fry/saute/drizzle on all of this stuff…

So actually, many of them are. The top 11 are probably at the top for a reason, or really, a combination of reasons, ranging from ease of cultivation to convenience to a good helping of path dependency. My point is, though, that they may make up 93% of our food, but they certainly don’t make up 93% of my enjoyment, and probably not anyone else’s enjoyment either. I want to taste those plants – fruits, vegetables, spices, herbs, and grains – that I haven’t tried, because if I’ve only tried a tiny percentage of them, and I still love food this much, how much more potential do I have to love food if I raise that percentage?

The mind boggles.

I’m trying to locate a list of these 30,000 plants. The closest I’ve come is from pro-foraging websites, Wikipedia, and an organization that wants to add diversity to global crops to increase sustainability, whose database is the biggest at 7,000 plants. I don’t expect a comprehensive document, but I’d like at least something I can use as a reference list to start searching for those little-known, little-used plants. I’m sure that many are confined to isolated, far-flung jungles and steppes and forests – in other words, I may not be able to drive there on the freeway – but I’m not opposed to an eventual rare-plant-seeking/critiquing world tour.

Spain: Something Beyond the Taste of the Food

Running through every review I’ve ever written, every recommendation I’ve ever given, and every posh place I’ve pooh-poohed is one common thread. That thread has propped up my dedication to holes in the wall, endeared me to food truck gatherings, and justified my disdain for places whose acclaim comes mainly from decor, atmosphere, service, fame, or history. And that thread is:

Nothing matters, nothing, except the taste of the food.

I’ve proclaimed so many times that a meal isn’t truly good unless it’d also be just as good wrapped in foil, leaking onto my hand, with my butt planted on a curb in a soulless suburban parking lot. I viewed any attention paid to plating – drizzling sauce in whimsical patterns, striping fruit slices like bright zebras, any grill markings not branded organically – as wasted. Same with cushions, lighting, wall hangings, deliberate acoustics, or attempts to recreate the atmosphere of either home or foreign countries (or jazz clubs, or rustic country inns, or…)

In Spain, though, I found myself charmed by something that was not the taste of the food. It was also not any of the other things I claim(ed?) to not care about. It was the almost aggressively casual attitude towards eating. People draped themselves all over patio chairs at 3PM like they were in their living room, draining endless beers, occasionally ordering some food, and feeding their dogs on the ground next to them. People packed themselves into tiny, earsplittingly loud bars starting at what in the States would be considered embarrassingly-early-o’clock to drink wine and stagger around with skewers of seafood and ham piled on top of bread. At all hours, windows opened in walls so cooks could hand through cheap kabob wraps.

There was this wonderful freeing feeling like there was no wrong way to eat, and that made the food taste better than it actually was.

I don’t often feel that way – like there’s no wrong way to eat – so this feeling was like letting out a long-held breath. In my life in the States, I pretty much always feel like people think I’m eating wrong. I don’t order wine in fancy restaurants – or ever – and that’s weird. I can’t finish a lot of food in one sitting, which means I have to either not order that much of it or share small portions with companions. That’s sometimes just weird, but other times actively not allowed: some restaurants have a minimum-order-per-person rule.

Not in Spain. Two of us could walk into any open restaurant at any time of day, order a small dish, share it, and walk out. It could be 3 in the afternoon, purportedly siesta time. The dish could cost €2. We could be in a bar, and ignore all offerings of alcohol. We could linger for hours nursing tap water and one stick of delicious grilled squid, and nobody would blink an eye. They’d come back to give us our bill when summoned, and not a minute before.

I remember us walking straight into a wall of sound, a tiny Basque tapas bar stuffed with screaming drunk people (it was perhaps 7pm) wobbling around these tiny standing tables sticking out of the walls. There was no room for the bar to store its wines aboveground, so there was a hole in the floor behind the bar with a ladder sticking out of it and waitresses periodically going down there to grab bottles. We sidled up to the last two seats at the bar and ordered a cod omelette, a skewer of shrimp and potato, and one piece of squid. This totaled less than €10. There was no change of expression on the bartender’s face indicating that this might be odd.

Another time, we had, again, the last two seats at a bar that was laid out in a long line from entrance to exit. Here, we really ordered a full dinner, but people started lining up behind us and having their tapas handed to them right over our heads so they could eat standing up out in the street!

Had I approached my summary of Spanish eating simply by looking at the raw ingredients, it would have gone something like this:

I never want to eat bread again.

Spaniards put bread under EVERYTHING. Ham and cheese? Bread. OK, that’s understandable. Blood sausage, pimiento, and quail egg? Bread. O…K, that’s, I guess, at least a platform for it. Smoked salmon with roe and cream cheese? Bread. Well, I wish it were a bagel, but fine. Shrimp, artichoke, and sesame sauce skewer? Bread. Why? A perfectly grilled squid tender enough to melt into a bite and needing no accompaniment, especially not bread?

It wasn’t even particularly good bread. In France, there was BREAD. The club of crusty bread they served with their soups made sense. This bread was aggressively yeasty and with a crackly crunch that sent clouds of flour billowing into the air, with the inside gapped with holes all ready to soak up the broth. Their croissants were cloudy air giving way to stretchy insides that snapped like taffy. But in Spain, the bread was just acceptable white bread; much better, of course, than any United States grocery store bread, but nothing that, say, I wanted in my mouth at every meal, distracting it from whatever amazing sea creature was cohabitating with it, which leads me to my next point:

Spain is amazing at seafood, especially the touchy, leaning-towards-tough types like octopus and squid. Every single tentacle I found on a skewer or sliced in rounds was tender, with the precious, necessary layer of fat between the flesh and the slippery skin intact. That fat provides the oil needed to soften the rest of it. Galician-style octopus, for example, is just sliced tentacles with oil, salt, and hot paprika – but what wonderful little oily coins! At a highly lauded Basque tapas bar in San Sebastian, we tried overwrought, fusiony dishes like sea urchin cream in a shell, whitefish pepper salad with a bizarre dissolving cracker, and a mushroom tower held together with aspic, but the only things we really wanted to order again were the octopus and squid skewers.

I also loved every bite of salmon I had, from the fusiony place’s stiffened, crisp version topped with its own roe to the lightly smoked billows topped simply with onions and tomatoes and perched on (what else?) bread. Even France stepped in and stole Scandinavia’s thunder with a smoked salmon crepe, leaving the fish plentiful and pillowy and only lightly dilled up.

So technically, I’m afraid to eat seafood again too, but only because I’m afraid it won’t measure up.

All that is fine and good and even accurate, but it doesn’t capture how at ease I felt wandering in and out of open-sided restaurants, in and out of grocery/marketplace/food stall/bar hybrids, eating exactly how and where and how quickly and how much I wanted. When I want to go back, when I have brief dreams of up and moving there, it’s because of that feeling. Eating doesn’t have to be an inherently judgmental experience or a big production or even a prenatal Yelp review.

That, and the markets are so sprawling and so full of fresh and novel ingredients that I know I’ll never understand the cuisine until I have a home with a kitchen.