China and I have a long-standing love-hate relationship.
At the end of the summer in 2013, when I compiled my top ten favorite meals from a trip through Japan, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia, I was surprised to find that four of them were from China. I forget how good the food can be when I’m distracted by how difficult China is to exist in on a day-to-day basis.
I’ve spent so many afternoons getting honked at by buses, pushed on the shoulder by crossing guards, jostled in front of by pretty much anyone joining a ‘line’, cigarette smoke blown in my face, spat in front of, told that an establishment does not in fact have what is printed on their menu or that it is actually twice as much as it states in print, only to end up, at the end of the day, eating local cold-water river fish lovingly stuffed with herbs and spit-grilled to perfection, or dumplings made with rare fungus and young leaves collected from the mountainside, or a zillion razor clams steamed in foil, for something under the equivalent of $2-3.
And then I can’t even go home and write about it, because the Chinese government blocks access to Google, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, Reddit, YouTube, and many more websites that I didn’t know I found indispensable until they weren’t available anymore. For good measure, sometimes the internet just plain stops working altogether, or the people next door start having an earsplitting karaoke party.
So despite spending 75% of my time in China thoroughly annoyed, I keep coming back. And there’s another reason for that. The friend I travel with and visit in China is fluent in Mandarin, which opens up a whole new world to me in terms of access to things tourists don’t generally access, understand, or even know exist. I’ve eaten a variety of snails out of a paper cup in the shantytown district of Shanghai, listened to a blind masseuse thunder about socialism and visas as he elbows my kidneys and cracks my neck alarmingly, visited the North Korean border at Tianchi Lake in Changbaishan Nature Reserve (which required a bewildering number of train, bus and taxi transfers that could never have been deciphered in English), and been able to interrogate-by-proxy every street vendor whose wares are hidden in steamers or behind the counter rather than having to rely on what I can see (a-la-Taiwanese night markets). And while people in public will bodily shove you out of the way to enter a reserved-seats train one second earlier, I admit that the attitude of most once you’re actually in their house or business is brusque but accommodating, and eventually, curious. So I would gather I know more about Chinese food and culture than any other country I’ve visited, even though I still speak very little Mandarin, can only recognize a few characters, and never feel the pull to return to China once I’ve left.
Again, though, I keep doing it. During this two-week trip I visited the northeast (Dongbei) region, visiting Changchun, Yanji, and Baihe (the gateway town for Changbaishan). Changchun, the provincial capital, was my home base. Yanji is a majority-ethnic-Korean city near the North Korean border (apparently a very porous border as that border goes) and Baihe is basically a resort town built up to serve the hordes of tourists visiting Changbaishan (though, confusingly, they centered it over 30km away from the park).
I expected Baihe to taste like, well, a boring overpriced resort town, but actually I had three of my most interesting meals there, which was fitting given that this was also where I felt the resulting ‘earthquake’ of North Korea’s most recent nuclear test. Downstairs from our hotel, there was a restaurant who served, on two separate nights, a dumpling feast consisting of rare fungus dumplings and young, dark green mountain leaf dumplings, and a plate of small whole cold water river fish in spicy garlic-cilantro sauce. We enjoyed these new flavors (the former tasted like a Chinese medicine shop smells – in a good way) while listening to a couple scream at each other outside a convenience store across the street. I knew that I had failed to adequately suck the fish heads clean of meat when the waitress asked me, “Are you used to Chinese food?” which I know really meant “You eat that fish wrong!”
Yanji was a stop we were looking forward to, hoping to get some unique Korean food, but what we ended up with was naengmyon (cold noodle) soup with a random watermelon slice in it for dinner, and kimbap (Korean rolled sushi) slathered in pink mayonnaise for lunch the next day. Happily, once I wiped the Pepto-Bismol covering off, the roll was very good, stuffed with fish eggs and radish.
I had plenty of time in Changchun to explore, as well as a kitchen at home to cook with, but I am ashamed to report I used the kitchen for only one purpose: to hardboil duck, goose, and wild chicken eggs that I bought from what they call the bazaar. The egg lady’s wares were the first thing I saw in the massive stadium-like indoor market, and she seemed to have every kind of egg from every kind of bird in the region. She didn’t have an ostrich egg, but I also didn’t have 40 people to share it with, so that worked out fine. I learned after cooking them that goose eggs > duck eggs > wild chicken eggs >>>>> regular chicken eggs, mostly because of the high yolk-white ratio, which is unfortunate for me given that I spent years in Long Beach searching for duck eggs and finding nothing.
I heard that Changchun sources its seafood from North Korea, which is dubiously legal at best, but is a good explanation for why a very landlocked capital has so much shellfish on offer, from razor clams to cockroach-looking lobster hybrids to crayfish to tiny blue crabs to large red crabs to oysters. On two separate occasions, I bought heavy foil-wrapped packets bursting with razor clams and regular clams steamed in spicy red broth with accompanying glass noodles for between $2 and $3, and not one single clam was bad. They were all sweet and chewy with tender innards, and I ate so many at once that my mouth started to tingle (whether from a latent shellfish allergy that only emerges when I eat 50 clams or from the mala spice blend used, I’m not sure). I also tried a xiaokao place’s specialty roast fish, which came out on a scorching black platter and was an incredibly frustrating meal because the fish flesh was so sweet and flaky, and the skin so blackened and deep spiced, but the bones so numerous and tiny that they pricked me in the gums like little Novocaine needles while being too small for me to find and remove before they pricked me. I sucked that fish clean enough to avoid any passively judgmental comments by our waitress, though.
Another thing Changchun should not by rights have, but does anyway, is a wide array of fruit, including tropical fruit like mango, rambutan, durian, starfruit, and papaya. Every day for the last week I was here I would stop at the same mango juice stand and wonder why its room-temperature thick sweetness was so much better than mango juice in countries where mango-juice-vendors could literally reach up from their carts and pick mangoes from the trees.
Though my friend told me that Changchun normally has much more street food, and that many of the alleys and carts were closed for inspection, one alley did open on the last night and provide me with something I’d never seen before: a naan-adjacent blackened flatbread cooked stuck to the side of a kiln, lined before cooking with seaweed and pork. It crackled between the teeth more like papadam than like naan and was sweet for some reason, but not that sickly fake-buttery sweet many Asian bakeries slather on their bread and cakes. More like honey. And the lack of street food is less bothersome when many restaurants retain street-food-level pricing and cluster in open-doored rows along narrow streets, or create permanent stands in bazaars like the one featuring the egg lady. These close-enough-to-street-food establishments served me such interesting meals as bright orange carrot-infused wheat noodles with a thick mushroom dipping sauce, a hot, flaky fresh hamburger-sized pastry filled with ground pork and overflowing with very pickled sour vegetables, a miniature bright red numbing Sichuan-style hot pot with white fish and huge piles of potato, bamboo shoots, and leaves, garlic-topped grilled oysters, and durian pancake.
When we did go to fancier sit-down restaurants, it was usually to escape Chinese food and overpay for things like fig, goat cheese, and pine nut pizza, or bibimbap infused with cheese. I may pooh-pooh those things from the comfort and diversity of my home in the USA, but when my mouth burns from days of hot/numbing spice and endless oil, I will absolutely savor figs, pine nuts, and goat cheese, even if the pizza dough is lackluster by almost any standard. Also, what pizza place in the US would accompany their pizza with passionfruit-calamansi juice or a blueberry smoothie?
Today (well, yesterday: remember, Chinese firewall?), I board a plane to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, suitcase stuffed with dried strawberries and blueberries and freeze-dried figs (China is awesome at dried fruits, especially when it refrains from adding sugar). Ho Chi Minh City is one of my favorite places, food-wise, in the world, and I think I’ve eaten much of what it has to offer during my previous two trips, but this time I’m going to try and go further afield to the Mekong Delta and the Vietnamese-Cambodian border at Ha Tien and Chau Doc, as well as to Mui Ne and Da Lat. No matter what happens, I’ll make sure to eat lots of snails.
Showing posts with label seafood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seafood. Show all posts
Thursday, September 14, 2017
Saturday, August 5, 2017
Easily Found Food
In foreign countries, there are lots of ways to fail at finding and eating the food you have so carefully researched ahead of time.
Vietnam specializes in the unauthorized duplication of famous stalls, presenting you with the quandary, for example, of three seemingly identical banh xeo stands facing each other across an alley. Korea likes to write its menus in a loopy, highly stylized script on wooden planks deep inside the dining room, where it would be exceedingly awkward to stand for minutes with face buried in Google Translate. China likes to run out of whatever the restaurant specializes in right as you arrive, even if you arrive at 6am. Malaysia goes a simpler route and just makes it impossible to walk anywhere.
Hokkaido, however, has taken all my memories of frustrated, fruitless city-wandering and shoves them aside. All restaurants are where they say they are, and if they don’t have lacquered replicas of their dishes in display cases outside, they have colorful posters, and if they don’t have colorful posters, they have a waiter willing to parse my halting hiragana-reading.
Unagi Kamogawa is wallpapered around the outer door with shiny but simple images of eel. Eel in round bowls and eel in square bowls – that’s it. I step into a den thick with eelsmoke, take off my shoes, and practically trip down into the space beneath the squatting table. A customer with one protruding bottom tooth and slow but confident English tells me he only eats eel once a month because it’s so expensive. It is – my round bowl is ¥2200 – but the two thick fillets are more smoky and tender than sweet and cloying, have only tiny flexible little bones that yield easily to my swallowing, and come with pickled vegetables and a clear soup featuring a mystery spring-onion-looking thing that tastes a little like a fish cake.
Sapporo’s Nijo market solves my ever-present problem at seafood markets: seeing all this delicious seafood but being unable to do anything with a giant horsehair crab or tank of abalone in my hostel/Airbnb. Next to the tanks of waving tentacles and claws and bubbling shells, there are restaurants, and the restaurants will put any combination of the market’s wares in a rice bowl for you. Again, it’s pricey, but ¥3800 gets me a sea urchin/salmon/salmon roe kaisen-don accompanied by a bowl of miso soup with, no exaggeration, half a crab tilted out of the side as if to mount a too-late escape attempt. The urchin is so soft and indistinct that it looks like scrambled eggs, usually bad news for a creature that gets runnier the longer it’s out of its shell, but it’s so mild and sweet that perhaps even avowed uni-haters would reconsider. It stains the rice under it sun-yellow, a welcome leftover after disappearing so quickly.
Oddly, the urchin here is better than in Otaru, the port where they actually capture them. Otaru’s kaisen-donlets me sample two different species of urchin, the northern variety and the short-spined variety, and while both are firm-edged, their flavor is tinged with iodine, and one’s color is somewhat greenish. Both would be laudable in a US sushi bar, but compared to Sapporo’s scrambled-eggy urchin, they pale. The winner in the Otaru bowl is the giant mound of crab meat next to it, taking up fully half the bowl and remaining sweet and stringily flavorful to the last mouthful. I always feel weirdly decadent eating chopstickfuls of crab meat, knowing the work it takes to extract just one strand from a shell, and as if to underline my uneasiness, they place a crab claw across the bowl with half the shell cleanly removed to reveal a perfect, untouched, still-claw-shaped wall of meat, ripe for the taking.
But one can’t always spend $30 on unagi or kaisen-don, and this is where Japan’s unsung heroes step in: train station restaurants. They always have English-speaking workers, and JR Sapporo Station is so much more than a train station, so it may be unfair to call its food train station food, but still: it’s a mall – actually three malls – two subway stations, and an underground tunnel to ensure continued commerce even during Hokkaido’s long winters. And it provides me with:
– legitimately excellent soba (studded with melt-in-your-mouth shrimp tempura and a tidy pile of tamago)
– airily-breaded tonkatsu surrounded by stuffed eggplant and shrimp, accompanied by mustard greens and silky chawanmushi
– a bowl filled with big chunks of soft tuna, bright green avocado, and that slimy white mass known as mountain yam that I usually hate, but that somehow ends up blended with rice to make a sticky-rice-like concoction, accompanied by gorgeously silky black sesame ice cream splashed with matcha ice.
Asahikawa Station, for its part, though only attached to a mere one mall, has a version of takoyaki that is perfectly cooked, incorporates greens into its batter and comes with a sour, zingy yuzu sauce. I pair it with a sugar-dusted green tea custard-filled taiyaki from a few stalls down.
While Japan may be lacking in the thrill of the chase, and therefore in providing me with the satisfaction that comes after having successfully chased a food item down, it’s kind of nice sometimes to just be able to decide what I want to eat, set off on an organized, efficient public transit system, and eat it!
Vietnam specializes in the unauthorized duplication of famous stalls, presenting you with the quandary, for example, of three seemingly identical banh xeo stands facing each other across an alley. Korea likes to write its menus in a loopy, highly stylized script on wooden planks deep inside the dining room, where it would be exceedingly awkward to stand for minutes with face buried in Google Translate. China likes to run out of whatever the restaurant specializes in right as you arrive, even if you arrive at 6am. Malaysia goes a simpler route and just makes it impossible to walk anywhere.
Hokkaido, however, has taken all my memories of frustrated, fruitless city-wandering and shoves them aside. All restaurants are where they say they are, and if they don’t have lacquered replicas of their dishes in display cases outside, they have colorful posters, and if they don’t have colorful posters, they have a waiter willing to parse my halting hiragana-reading.
Unagi Kamogawa is wallpapered around the outer door with shiny but simple images of eel. Eel in round bowls and eel in square bowls – that’s it. I step into a den thick with eelsmoke, take off my shoes, and practically trip down into the space beneath the squatting table. A customer with one protruding bottom tooth and slow but confident English tells me he only eats eel once a month because it’s so expensive. It is – my round bowl is ¥2200 – but the two thick fillets are more smoky and tender than sweet and cloying, have only tiny flexible little bones that yield easily to my swallowing, and come with pickled vegetables and a clear soup featuring a mystery spring-onion-looking thing that tastes a little like a fish cake.
Sapporo’s Nijo market solves my ever-present problem at seafood markets: seeing all this delicious seafood but being unable to do anything with a giant horsehair crab or tank of abalone in my hostel/Airbnb. Next to the tanks of waving tentacles and claws and bubbling shells, there are restaurants, and the restaurants will put any combination of the market’s wares in a rice bowl for you. Again, it’s pricey, but ¥3800 gets me a sea urchin/salmon/salmon roe kaisen-don accompanied by a bowl of miso soup with, no exaggeration, half a crab tilted out of the side as if to mount a too-late escape attempt. The urchin is so soft and indistinct that it looks like scrambled eggs, usually bad news for a creature that gets runnier the longer it’s out of its shell, but it’s so mild and sweet that perhaps even avowed uni-haters would reconsider. It stains the rice under it sun-yellow, a welcome leftover after disappearing so quickly.
Oddly, the urchin here is better than in Otaru, the port where they actually capture them. Otaru’s kaisen-donlets me sample two different species of urchin, the northern variety and the short-spined variety, and while both are firm-edged, their flavor is tinged with iodine, and one’s color is somewhat greenish. Both would be laudable in a US sushi bar, but compared to Sapporo’s scrambled-eggy urchin, they pale. The winner in the Otaru bowl is the giant mound of crab meat next to it, taking up fully half the bowl and remaining sweet and stringily flavorful to the last mouthful. I always feel weirdly decadent eating chopstickfuls of crab meat, knowing the work it takes to extract just one strand from a shell, and as if to underline my uneasiness, they place a crab claw across the bowl with half the shell cleanly removed to reveal a perfect, untouched, still-claw-shaped wall of meat, ripe for the taking.
But one can’t always spend $30 on unagi or kaisen-don, and this is where Japan’s unsung heroes step in: train station restaurants. They always have English-speaking workers, and JR Sapporo Station is so much more than a train station, so it may be unfair to call its food train station food, but still: it’s a mall – actually three malls – two subway stations, and an underground tunnel to ensure continued commerce even during Hokkaido’s long winters. And it provides me with:
– legitimately excellent soba (studded with melt-in-your-mouth shrimp tempura and a tidy pile of tamago)
– airily-breaded tonkatsu surrounded by stuffed eggplant and shrimp, accompanied by mustard greens and silky chawanmushi
– a bowl filled with big chunks of soft tuna, bright green avocado, and that slimy white mass known as mountain yam that I usually hate, but that somehow ends up blended with rice to make a sticky-rice-like concoction, accompanied by gorgeously silky black sesame ice cream splashed with matcha ice.
Asahikawa Station, for its part, though only attached to a mere one mall, has a version of takoyaki that is perfectly cooked, incorporates greens into its batter and comes with a sour, zingy yuzu sauce. I pair it with a sugar-dusted green tea custard-filled taiyaki from a few stalls down.
While Japan may be lacking in the thrill of the chase, and therefore in providing me with the satisfaction that comes after having successfully chased a food item down, it’s kind of nice sometimes to just be able to decide what I want to eat, set off on an organized, efficient public transit system, and eat it!
Saturday, May 7, 2016
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Biography of an ingredient I: Uni (sea urchin)
What it tastes like:
- Mixed with cream, butter, various herbs, and often other types of fish roe, and tossed with pasta at various Japanese or Italian restaurants. I recommend Café Hiro (in Cypress), which manages to get every single strand thickly coated with rich orange seawatery goodness.
- Alive, with spikes twitching unsettlingly, creeping away from you at the glacial rate of an inch per minute, on paper plates at live seafood bars like Quality Seafood in Redondo Beach. Make sure that the spiky shell is cracked only after you select your specimen: the point of getting urchins this fresh is that their taste changes subtly after only a few minutes outside their shells.
- Forming the flowered centerpiece of stunningly beautiful chirashi bowls at Maruhide Uni Club in Torrance. This blooming, rich confluence of custard, sea vegetables, and rice must be tasted to be believed.
- Marinated in kombu-shoyu and served as an appetizer on Japan Airlines - but you have to upgrade to first class to get a taste!
Three reasons you should try it:
1. Sea urchins eat kelp. Kelp forms a protective forest for delicate seafloor life and also slows beach erosion. Save the ocean; dine on urchin!
2. Sea urchin is a diet-cheater’s dream. It somehow has fewer calories than fish like salmon and mackerel while having essentially the same richness experience as heavy cream. It’s also full of omega-3 fatty acids. Butter not allowed? Urchin on toast!
3. If you’re going to eat a live sea creature, better that it isn’t sannakji! Sannakji, Korean-style live baby octopus chopped into pieces and served still wriggling, will grasp and hold fast to the inside of your throat in their tentacly death throes. They can quite literally choke a person to death doing this. Sea urchins, conversely, will just attempt to escape your plate slowly and directionlessly.
Parting thoughts
Who on earth discovered that eating orange slime out of an impenetrable spike forest was a delicacy??
Proponents laud its flavor as akin to a briny, extra-rich egg yolk or a sweeter, less seawatery oyster, while its detractors argue it tastes more like metallic chlorine with the texture of Play-Doh. Needless to say, this is an extremely polarizing food.
What it looks like:
While the whole sea urchin, undisturbed, looks like a lethal black, red, or green Koosh-ball, what you’ll see on your plate are usually the gonads alone: yellow-orange tongues built out of microscopic eggs.
How it’s served:
- Plain or lightly marinated, folded over on itself like thick cream, over rice wrapped in seaweed, at most sushi bars. I recommend Ikko (in Costa Mesa), whose sushi is otherwise uninspiring; perhaps they pour all their available love into their urchins, which come out miles ahead of any local competition. Ohshima (in Orange) or Nana San (in Newport Beach) are better all-around sushi bars, whose chefs serve their expertly marinated uni nigiri as an integral part of a whole stunning omakase experience.
What it looks like:
While the whole sea urchin, undisturbed, looks like a lethal black, red, or green Koosh-ball, what you’ll see on your plate are usually the gonads alone: yellow-orange tongues built out of microscopic eggs.
How it’s served:
- Plain or lightly marinated, folded over on itself like thick cream, over rice wrapped in seaweed, at most sushi bars. I recommend Ikko (in Costa Mesa), whose sushi is otherwise uninspiring; perhaps they pour all their available love into their urchins, which come out miles ahead of any local competition. Ohshima (in Orange) or Nana San (in Newport Beach) are better all-around sushi bars, whose chefs serve their expertly marinated uni nigiri as an integral part of a whole stunning omakase experience.
- Mixed with cream, butter, various herbs, and often other types of fish roe, and tossed with pasta at various Japanese or Italian restaurants. I recommend Café Hiro (in Cypress), which manages to get every single strand thickly coated with rich orange seawatery goodness.
- Alive, with spikes twitching unsettlingly, creeping away from you at the glacial rate of an inch per minute, on paper plates at live seafood bars like Quality Seafood in Redondo Beach. Make sure that the spiky shell is cracked only after you select your specimen: the point of getting urchins this fresh is that their taste changes subtly after only a few minutes outside their shells.
- Forming the flowered centerpiece of stunningly beautiful chirashi bowls at Maruhide Uni Club in Torrance. This blooming, rich confluence of custard, sea vegetables, and rice must be tasted to be believed.
- Marinated in kombu-shoyu and served as an appetizer on Japan Airlines - but you have to upgrade to first class to get a taste!
Three reasons you should try it:
1. Sea urchins eat kelp. Kelp forms a protective forest for delicate seafloor life and also slows beach erosion. Save the ocean; dine on urchin!
2. Sea urchin is a diet-cheater’s dream. It somehow has fewer calories than fish like salmon and mackerel while having essentially the same richness experience as heavy cream. It’s also full of omega-3 fatty acids. Butter not allowed? Urchin on toast!
3. If you’re going to eat a live sea creature, better that it isn’t sannakji! Sannakji, Korean-style live baby octopus chopped into pieces and served still wriggling, will grasp and hold fast to the inside of your throat in their tentacly death throes. They can quite literally choke a person to death doing this. Sea urchins, conversely, will just attempt to escape your plate slowly and directionlessly.
Parting thoughts
Who on earth discovered that eating orange slime out of an impenetrable spike forest was a delicacy??
Friday, October 18, 2013
Ốc Đào: Worth the hype
As long as I'm reviewing Hồ Chí Minh city restaurants that have expanded their fame to international levels (see: Bánh Xèo 46A), I may as well stay on that path and divulge that the place I will miss the most isn't a hidden gem, or an unassuming street stall, or totally inaccessible to tourists or anything. It's even another Bourdain-vetted place.*
Ốc Đào.
Its address is a uniquely Saigonesque maze, including not only the implication that the place is in an unnamed alley off the main street, but is tucked away on one of four branches of the alley (A, B, C, and D) that are completely unlabeled. Passing by about fourteen nail salons, a bunch of domestic doorways with curious old people peering out of them, and some too-interested dogs, I thought for sure we were going the wrong way. But we weren't.
My waiter, the nephew of the owner, said he waits on foreigners all the time. He's the designated foreigner-waiter because of his good English. As I sat down for the first time, the fluttering of menus and giggling surrounding me dispersed in the same direction - to go get this guy, Linh, an enthusiastic twenty-year-old who immediately squired me to the cooks' area to look at all the snails. Big coiled oblong snails, tiny flat snails, corkscrew-shaped snails, leopard-spotted snails, striped snails. Not to mention the splayed salty flesh of oysters, mussels, scallops, and clams.
After I'd made my choice, we sat down together and I tried to help him learn the English names for the dishes on his menu. It was nearly impossible. The Vietnamese have a different name for every species of edible snail, whereas we... well, we hardly have a mental concept for an edible snail in the first place. I was able to translate 'mussels', 'scallops', and 'lemongrass' and that was about it. (As a bonus, I eventually ordered all the things I translated!)
---
The first night, chosen right from a living lineup:
These snails were rich, slickly orange and sweet-sour, punctuated occasionally with candle-waxy stubs of pork fat. The snail flesh resisted pulling with toothpicks, and it was a joy the few times one came out in one perfect piece, curled inner coil and all, whole and ready for swishing in fish sauce, spearing with rau răm, and dragging through chili-lime paste.
As many scallops as I've eaten in my life, I never knew they came in such a picturesque shell. When I saw their scalloped edges, a lightbulb burned suddenly in my brain. That's why they're called scallops!
Note the appearance of green mango spears in the upper left-hand corner: I finally caught on that the roving bands of snack-toting women had things to offer other than baguettes and packets of 10 quail fetuses. (3 or 4 quail fetuses would have been fine; 10 is pushing it.)
Usually snail flesh itself doesn't taste like much: it just serves as a vehicle for flavor. This type of snail has a distinct taste: fishy, kind of froggy even, with a bouncy texture. Since steaming with lemongrass is not a hit-you-over-the-head kind of preparation, the dish needed the natural flavor of the snails to come through.
Also, rambutan had appeared by now (upper right). It was placed without comment next to me by a smiling older waitress. Grateful, I dug into them with my hopelessly greasy fingers. Like little sponges, the rambutan skin soaked up the oil, cleaning my hands better than any towel.
---
Expensive by Hồ Chí Minh City standards, each meal cost me the stunning sum of US$5.
Had I had another month there, I would have returned six or seven times. Enough to sweep their menu. Enough to extract snails from their shells blindfolded and armed only with one dull safety pin.
-----
*I may generally shy away from famous places, but if I'm going to culinarily follow someone around Vietnam, it's Anthony Bourdain. Anyone who has the kind of credentials he does, and the connections to eat with, and at, the sweethearts of the food world, and still calls Vietnam his favorite food place, choosing to move to Vietnam for a year... that person might just be my tastebud twin.
Ốc Đào.
Its address is a uniquely Saigonesque maze, including not only the implication that the place is in an unnamed alley off the main street, but is tucked away on one of four branches of the alley (A, B, C, and D) that are completely unlabeled. Passing by about fourteen nail salons, a bunch of domestic doorways with curious old people peering out of them, and some too-interested dogs, I thought for sure we were going the wrong way. But we weren't.
My waiter, the nephew of the owner, said he waits on foreigners all the time. He's the designated foreigner-waiter because of his good English. As I sat down for the first time, the fluttering of menus and giggling surrounding me dispersed in the same direction - to go get this guy, Linh, an enthusiastic twenty-year-old who immediately squired me to the cooks' area to look at all the snails. Big coiled oblong snails, tiny flat snails, corkscrew-shaped snails, leopard-spotted snails, striped snails. Not to mention the splayed salty flesh of oysters, mussels, scallops, and clams.
After I'd made my choice, we sat down together and I tried to help him learn the English names for the dishes on his menu. It was nearly impossible. The Vietnamese have a different name for every species of edible snail, whereas we... well, we hardly have a mental concept for an edible snail in the first place. I was able to translate 'mussels', 'scallops', and 'lemongrass' and that was about it. (As a bonus, I eventually ordered all the things I translated!)
---
The first night, chosen right from a living lineup:
 |
| Ốc bông me: snails in tamarind sauce |
 |
| Sò điệp mỡ hành: scallops with peanuts and green onions |
Smaller than I'm used to, and tougher, with a texture more like a firm white-fish than the silky smoothness of raw scallops or the striped firm flan texture of scallops on a barbecue, these were a wholly new scallop experience to me.
---
The second night: ordered confidently from the menu after some internet research and translating:
Though these mussels had the same preparation as the scallops the first night, they had a much stronger flavor. Apart from a ring of snapping rubber, the flesh was yielding and full of ocean.
 |
| Chem chép mỡ hành: mussels with peanuts and green onions |
Note the appearance of green mango spears in the upper left-hand corner: I finally caught on that the roving bands of snack-toting women had things to offer other than baguettes and packets of 10 quail fetuses. (3 or 4 quail fetuses would have been fine; 10 is pushing it.)
 |
| Ốc hương xào sả : leopard-spotted snails steamed with lemongrass |
Also, rambutan had appeared by now (upper right). It was placed without comment next to me by a smiling older waitress. Grateful, I dug into them with my hopelessly greasy fingers. Like little sponges, the rambutan skin soaked up the oil, cleaning my hands better than any towel.
---
Expensive by Hồ Chí Minh City standards, each meal cost me the stunning sum of US$5.
Had I had another month there, I would have returned six or seven times. Enough to sweep their menu. Enough to extract snails from their shells blindfolded and armed only with one dull safety pin.
-----
*I may generally shy away from famous places, but if I'm going to culinarily follow someone around Vietnam, it's Anthony Bourdain. Anyone who has the kind of credentials he does, and the connections to eat with, and at, the sweethearts of the food world, and still calls Vietnam his favorite food place, choosing to move to Vietnam for a year... that person might just be my tastebud twin.
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