“Don’t miss the food carts,” said pretty much everyone when I mentioned I was visiting Portland.
Having never been to a city in the US where semipermanent food cart encampments were allowed (cities in China, Korea, Malaysia, etc, sure, but not in the US) I sort of blew off this advice, figuring they meant something like a food truck gathering, which in LA is now synonymous with hordes of hipsters, $20 parking, and hour-long lines.
What they meant, it turns out, is that on random street corners throughout the city, the edges of parking lots are full of trailers, RVs, converted buses, wheel-less or wheeled trucks, or tiny houses, serving food from all over the world. They have weird hours and even weirder seating options, and look a lot like the encampments at Slab City, but their menus are overall pretty mouthwatering-looking.
There’s a lot of emphasis on Middle Eastern food, and Egyptian and Iraqi food in particular. Dinner one night was a sabich, billed as a ‘Jewish-Iraqi breakfast’ – a soft, warm pita oozing a mixture of egg, hummus, pickled mango sauce, and eggplant guts all over the potatoes inside. This was from Wolf & Bear’s, which looked like one piece of an old-timey caravan, tucked pretty permanently in a parking lot across from a bookstore. I wish I had had time to get into the nuances of the differences between Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Jordanian food, as the carts were pretty explicit about specifying their origin, but their menus looked identical: falafel, kabobs, hummus, dolmas, tabbouleh, etc.
On a different day, a failed attempt at eating at “the only Mauritian restaurant in the US” (apparently it has a ‘Closed When Out Of Food’ policy) led me to hold myself over with some Haitian meat pies and a papaya smoothie at Caribbean Kitchen next door. The pies’ dough was perfectly light and flaky, graduating slowly into a melty symbiosis with the meat filling, which felt like all its spices had been muted.
Thus over-breaded, I stole bites here and there of my companion’s vegan hiyashi ramen, an angry red cauldron of shichimi togarashi (Japanese seven spice), oil, mushrooms, cabbages, and very al dente noodles. The overall effect was somewhere between that chunky red pepper paste served at dim sum restaurants and a mushroom salad dressed in oil. Not one to shy away from excessive oil, my lunch the next day was a plate of meat oil-soaked kielbasa, pierogi, and cabbage stew from a cart at the Saturday market.
Some non-food cart adventures included a vegetarian combination Ethiopian lunch plate, trendy ‘Korean-fusion restaurant‘ (I put this in quotes because there was very little Korean about my honey-anchovy encrusted potato chips, Dungeness crab seaweed noodle concoction, or the okay-I-guess-vaguely-Korean-esque scordalia pancake topped with gravlax and greens), a ramen joint that didn’t skimp on the Sichuan peppercorns (yes, Sichuan hot-pot-inspired ramen!), and an outrageously tasty goat-milk/marionberry jam/habanero ice cream. Right before leaving, I enjoyed a neat, spare, and walnut-brea-accompanied Swedish hash with trout, getting to the restaurantmere minutes before the rest of Portland.
It sounds like I had a world-traipsingly good time, and I did, in a way. If you want a the most accessible tour of the culinary surface of the world, you can’t do much better than Portland. However, my travel-scarred tastebuds tell me that it was just that: the surface. Nowhere were my preconceptions or preferences challenged, my mouth heated to more than a ‘mild’ (except for in the case of the Sichuan peppercorn ramen), or my horizons expanded. Everything I ate was well within the comfort zone of the average mildly adventurous American. Not once did I have to try and parse an unfamiliar language or a questionable translation, make an embarrassing faux-pas, or feel like a visitor to a different culture’s space.
It felt like everything was being marketed TO me -or at least the part of me that exists as a white American culinary tourist. I was the intended audience. Not the people whose culture’s food was being marketed.
I’m not knocking Portland for this, necessarily. If you want to make the most money, you obviously want to market to your biggest, well, market, and in Portland, maybe that’s the mainly white American culinary tourist. And maybe this kind of dabbling leads to more people being more open and experimental with food choices. I didn’t start out eating pork knuckles and beef tendons. First I needed to know that pork knuckles and beef tendons were food and were being served at restaurants. Others may need a larger shove than just awareness: first sausage, then blood sausage, then blood cubes, then raw goat blood pudding, for example?
Still, such extreme accessibility, no matter how convenient and at times even tasty, feels weird and a little icky. I’d rather pay a steeper price of admission into another culture’s universe.
My favorite thing about Portland was something that needed no marketing at all: the local berries! Vancouver (Washington)’s farmers market provided me with all the marionberries, tiny strawberries, and Rainier cherries that I could eat, and the flavors were so wholly different from anything available in California that they instantly made the whole trip worth it.
Showing posts with label Middle Eastern. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Middle Eastern. Show all posts
Thursday, July 13, 2017
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Undoing past prejudices: Shawarma at Pita Bar & Grill
In college, I worked at an Israeli restaurant that shall, as far as this blog is concerned, remain nameless.
We served falafel, gyros, shawarma, hummus, babagannouj, marinated eggplant, and various vegetarian salads. I used to mist the inside of my water bottle with a squirt from our rosewater cooler, for making rosewater lemonade, and snack on little sauce-cups full of tabbouleh when business was slow.
Despite the fact that this place was the only place I'd ever had shawarma, I took my experience here to mean that I did not like shawarma. Apparently I also internalized that it was always made from a big hunk of dry chicken or turkey mixed with onions on a spit and decorated with absolutely nothing.
But the mind remembers only that it feels a certain way, not why it feels a certain way, and I never went out of my way to order shawarma again. Sometimes I would look at it, slowly rotating, glistening with juices that ran down its bumpy sides into the pan underneath, and wonder for a split second. But I'd remember the gristly, unchewable poultry I'd held in my mouth four, five, seven years ago, and I'd take a pass.
October, 2013:
"There's a place over on Fairfax that makes great shawarma," a friend said to me as we were inching down La Brea at a snail's place, making almost zero progress towards our usual destination: Japanese breakfast in Gardena.
"So?" I said. I was grumpy. It was Saturday and there was no reason for there to be so much goddamn traffic. "I hate shawarma."
"Not this shawarma. I promise."
Something inside me unlocked. It was probably the traffic, my absolute unwillingness to sit for another instant behind every single sports car in West Hollywood. "You want to go now?" I asked him. "Let's go now."
He swung the car across a few lanes of ambling traffic and made the turn.
The whole district was virtually shuttered; a largely Orthodox neighborhood on a Saturday, wrought-iron gates were slammed down over darkened shop windows and the streets were full of dressed up, yarmulke-d families coming from temple. Pita Bar & Grill, sandwiched between a closed something-or-other and a wall of chains, barely gave off any indication that it was open, but it was.
Effortfully not allowing myself to be distracted by the Moroccan mergueze sausage, I ordered a shawarma pita. He didn't ask me what I wanted on it, and I didn't want him to. I like it when places give you whatever they feel is tastiest.
In this case, the little wrap was more of a bursting salad than a sandwich, its hunks of lamb all but buried in a pile of mild sauerkraut, bright purple cabbage, and assorted salad-like accoutrements, and smothered in a light hummus. Despite the wetness and sheer weight of the fillings, the pita remained warm and unmoved.
I wasn't even expecting to be able to taste the meat under everything pressing it down, but despite it all, the gamey lamb flavor came stampeding out of the gate, cinnamon clutching the reins.
There were green bottles, there were white bottles, there were red bottles, there were orange bottles. Just in case all of the salad and all of the meat marinade wasn't enough, I could choose to slather my sandwich in garlic chili sauce, or preserved mango sauce, or tahini, or garlic paste, or cilantro jalapeño sauce.
I chose the cilantro jalapeño sauce, which hit me with some pleasing Peruvian memories, but otherwise couldn't possibly improve on the flavor.
Not one hint of gristle touched my teeth, not one tough tendon assaulted my jaw, and I even felt healthy afterwards, that kind of cheating-healthy where the sheer amount of vegetables piled on your oily grilled meat fools your stomach into thinking it's ingested a salad, rather than oily grilled meat.
Never again will I claim not to like shawarma. In fact, this experience reminds me to never claim not to like anything: there's always an amazing preparation somewhere. You just have to find it.
We served falafel, gyros, shawarma, hummus, babagannouj, marinated eggplant, and various vegetarian salads. I used to mist the inside of my water bottle with a squirt from our rosewater cooler, for making rosewater lemonade, and snack on little sauce-cups full of tabbouleh when business was slow.
Despite the fact that this place was the only place I'd ever had shawarma, I took my experience here to mean that I did not like shawarma. Apparently I also internalized that it was always made from a big hunk of dry chicken or turkey mixed with onions on a spit and decorated with absolutely nothing.
But the mind remembers only that it feels a certain way, not why it feels a certain way, and I never went out of my way to order shawarma again. Sometimes I would look at it, slowly rotating, glistening with juices that ran down its bumpy sides into the pan underneath, and wonder for a split second. But I'd remember the gristly, unchewable poultry I'd held in my mouth four, five, seven years ago, and I'd take a pass.
October, 2013:
"There's a place over on Fairfax that makes great shawarma," a friend said to me as we were inching down La Brea at a snail's place, making almost zero progress towards our usual destination: Japanese breakfast in Gardena.
"So?" I said. I was grumpy. It was Saturday and there was no reason for there to be so much goddamn traffic. "I hate shawarma."
"Not this shawarma. I promise."
Something inside me unlocked. It was probably the traffic, my absolute unwillingness to sit for another instant behind every single sports car in West Hollywood. "You want to go now?" I asked him. "Let's go now."
He swung the car across a few lanes of ambling traffic and made the turn.
The whole district was virtually shuttered; a largely Orthodox neighborhood on a Saturday, wrought-iron gates were slammed down over darkened shop windows and the streets were full of dressed up, yarmulke-d families coming from temple. Pita Bar & Grill, sandwiched between a closed something-or-other and a wall of chains, barely gave off any indication that it was open, but it was.
Effortfully not allowing myself to be distracted by the Moroccan mergueze sausage, I ordered a shawarma pita. He didn't ask me what I wanted on it, and I didn't want him to. I like it when places give you whatever they feel is tastiest.
In this case, the little wrap was more of a bursting salad than a sandwich, its hunks of lamb all but buried in a pile of mild sauerkraut, bright purple cabbage, and assorted salad-like accoutrements, and smothered in a light hummus. Despite the wetness and sheer weight of the fillings, the pita remained warm and unmoved.
I wasn't even expecting to be able to taste the meat under everything pressing it down, but despite it all, the gamey lamb flavor came stampeding out of the gate, cinnamon clutching the reins.
There were green bottles, there were white bottles, there were red bottles, there were orange bottles. Just in case all of the salad and all of the meat marinade wasn't enough, I could choose to slather my sandwich in garlic chili sauce, or preserved mango sauce, or tahini, or garlic paste, or cilantro jalapeño sauce.
I chose the cilantro jalapeño sauce, which hit me with some pleasing Peruvian memories, but otherwise couldn't possibly improve on the flavor.
Not one hint of gristle touched my teeth, not one tough tendon assaulted my jaw, and I even felt healthy afterwards, that kind of cheating-healthy where the sheer amount of vegetables piled on your oily grilled meat fools your stomach into thinking it's ingested a salad, rather than oily grilled meat.
Never again will I claim not to like shawarma. In fact, this experience reminds me to never claim not to like anything: there's always an amazing preparation somewhere. You just have to find it.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)