Fun Thai Food in Financial District

I'm having this coconut ice cream in a young coconut shell as I'm typing this. It's delicious and fun and it's from 35 Thai (35 Lispenard St). They have a similar pineapple ice cream served in a baby pineapple!

This coconut ice cream is very light (feels like there's very little fat in this, possibly because they used a good portion of coconut water to make it instead of cream/milk), so it is a completely different ice cream experience than the rich, butter-like frozen nitrogen ice cream served at Lulu & Mooky's that we tried a couple of months ago!

I was also very tempted to get frog legs from Cafe Sage (108 John St) but they are cash only and I only had $5 on me. You can get their frog legs
a) in red curry sauce with red onion.
b) In garlic and pepper sauce
c) In basil and chili pepper sauce.

I'll have to try them next time! Continue...

Weird Food Club recommendations for NYC Restaurant Week Winter 2010

Img via The Modern

2010 Winter Restaurant Week is Monday-Friday, January 25-29 and February 1-5, 2010. Although most NYC chefs stick to their tried and true butternut squash soups, duck confits and panna cottas, luckily, a few of them take the opportunity to experiment with their menus. Restaurant Week is also a fantastic opportunity for you to try rare and/or expensive ingredients on the cheap -- all selected dinners are $35 so hurry for reservations.

1.Brasserie 8 and 1/2
Fluke Tartare (Avocado & Sea Urchin, Mango Vinegar, Cucumber)
Slow Braised Goat (Chicken of the Wood Mushrooms, Polenta)
Blood Orange Mirror Cake (White Chocolate Mousse, Passion Fruit Coulis)

2.The Modern
Braised Tripe with chickpeas and harissa aioli or steak tartare with quail egg
Saffron Tagliatelli with cider braised rabbit, wild mushrooms and baby zucchini
Hazelnut Dacquoise with milk chocolate chantilly.

3.Industria Argentina
Mollejas al Verdeo (Crispy sautéed sweetbreads, scallion and white wine sauce)
Milanesa de Pescado (Skate wing milanesa, brown butter, cappers, cauliflower purée)
Bombón Suizo (Dulce de leche Argentinean-style Tartufo, warm dulce de leche sauce)

4.Trattoria dell'Arte
Toredelli Bolognese (wild boar & porcini stuffed pasta with a three meat ragu, baby arugula)
Veal and Wild Mushroom Marsala (shaved black truffle)
Gelato

5.Rouge Tomate
Gravlax (a Scandinavian appetizer)
Duck with kumquat and coriander (avail. Regularly)
Passion fruit curd

Also try:

Caviar @ Petrossian

US Kobe beef skewers, Fish shaped Japanese waffle ice cream @ Inakaya

Wild boar stew with soft truffle polenta @ Osteria del Circo

Salmon Kulebiyaka @ Firebird

Huitlacoche Crepes @ Maya

Raw Tuna Pizza @ Mercer Kitchen

Squab @ Mr. Chow Continue...

Thai food that needs to be discovered in New York

Jackfruit

Apologies for my long absence and silence. Yours truly has been sampling unusual culinary creations in the Kingdom of Thailand, where street carts, night markets, cafes and restaurants had a vast selection of fun edible stuff. Here’s just a small taste of what I found.

STREET FOOD THAT IS NOT SCARY


Jackfruit ice cream in a cone. Jackfruit itself is rubbery and tastes a bit like bubble gum.



Sweet sticky rice with sesame seeds served on a palm leaf, eaten with toothpicks.


One can eat many things on a stick.


BLACK JELLY







Chow-Guai is a vegetable jelly made from a Chinese plant. It's black and is eaten with ice and palm sugar. This is a dish shrouded in mystery -- no other information can be found about this.

DRIED SOUR FRUITS





BUGS! OF ALL SORTS!


Crickets, beetles, larvae! Play the slideshow to see me eating them. These bugs were sold from a street cart. I picked out the ones I wanted to try, they were scooped into a plastic bag for me and sprayed with some kind of salty soy sauce-like spray but remained crunchy. We only saw one bug cart like this throughout the duration of our trip, so I don't think they are very popular. My eyes lit up when I saw this street cart, so I'm glad we decided to try the bugs that same instant and not to wait to find another one later.

SNAKEHEAD FISH


This is a grilled snakehead fish. It is called so because its head looks like it is covered in snake-like scales and because of its other peculiar features: this freshwater fish breathes atmospheric air with primitive lungs and feeds on other fish and small animals like frogs and rats. Not much of a fish now, is it?

SOMETHING I FORGET THE NAME OF


This is a Muslim dessert crepe that one purchases with a bag of colorful palm sugar strings. We were told it would be unbearably sweet and kind of dry but it turned out moderately sweet and delicious. It was a little bit like eating cotton candy in a crepe. We tried it in Ayutthaya.



KHAO SOI NOODLES


Khao soi noodles are deep fried and crunchy, floating in a very rich coconut milk-based curry.


VAST FOOD COURTS


This food court at the Siam Paragon mall in Bangkok is the largest food court I have ever seen in my life. It had an extraordinary selection of restaurants, stalls, cafes, mini-grocery shops and bakeries. I haven't seen a larger food court even in Japan. Does anyone know of a larger food court? My favorite finds here were the marshmallow taco, hot dog pancakes and a bear-shaped bread bun.

This is a reminder that a whole world of weird food exists beyond the shores of our city, but to stick to the focus of this blog, I will try to research for you guys where you can sample some of this stuff on our soil. Continue...

Varutha Moolai and other specialities

You haven’t really eaten in New York unless you’ve eaten with the Gastronauts. This club enables New Yorkers to eat things at restaurants that typically aren’t on those restaurants’ menus.

Last month, I joined them for an evening at Southern Spice in Flushing, Queens. Every time I attend one of these meetings, my excitement level goes through the roof. The regular members are fun to talk to and conversations are informative and interesting. It’s always a pleasure to take part.

First the Rabbit Masala. While most pieces of rabbit were of the regular size and shape variety, I had strong urge to grab the one and only skull. The meat wasn’t better nor worse than the rest, but there was much less of it. Most of what can be seen here was bone and I had to move on. Sort of gamey, venison-like, tasty. (7)

Vowvaal Mean (pomfreet steamed in banana leaf) Tender fish came right off the bone, although I prefer other fish flavors over this one. (5)

Sura Puttu (Shark Scrambled) Not bad, not great either. Again, something with the flavor just wasn’t like the shark steaks on the grill I remember growing up as a kid. I think it was the flavoring. (5)

Crab Masala Uthappam Like crepes filled with masala crab meat. I could have eaten fifty of these. Absolutely heavenly! (10)




















Varutha Moolai (Goat Brain) Very rich and tender. A salty, creamy sauce covered the zombie food. Compared with the brain quesadillas, I would make a second trip back to La Superior as opposed to giving varutha moolai a second go. But overall, it was a very tasty dish worth trying. (8) Continue...

Weird Drinks Party Part 1

The Soviet Chemistry Lab

Buratino, Baikal, and Tarkhun are brands of sugary carbonated soft drinks usually consumed at kids' birthday parties but I'm only now discovering their dark secrets!

Buratino (6/10)


Named after the Russian version of "Pinocchio", this drink has no equivalent that I've ever tasted in any other culture. It's somewhere between faint apple and orange soda, but neither one of the two in particular. This drink is the least sugary of the 3 Russian sodas, and scores points for stirring up nostalgic memories of my last birthday in Russia.

Baikal (4/10)


The Soviet answer to Coca-Cola, this drink is sweeter than Coke, but it doesn't have that umph! of the secret ingredient in Coke.

It is named after the Olympic star of all world lakes: Baikal Lake is at once the most voluminous, the deepest, and the clearest of all freshwater lakes in the world, and is located in Siberia. I love the label on this drink showing a muddy-brown tidal wave of Coke imitation soda threateningly hovering over the pristine waters of Baikal.

Tarkhun (4/10)


It looks like it came from the Chernobyl nuclear plant and tastes equally radioactive. Its 26g of sugar per 250 ml serving do not really mask the chemical flavor of the drink. The scary part is that the contents do not list any food coloring so the radioactive green color must be the effect of mixing all other ingredients (or maybe they just forgot to list it).

I've always thought that the word "Tarkhun" had no meaning, but the English translation "Tarragon" on the label led me to discover that the primary flavor in this drink is tarragon, an herb related to wormwood, which is used to make the most famous green drink of all - absinthe. So Tarkhun must be the kids' version of absinthe.


Like absinthe, Tarkhun needs to be properly mixed with a complementary mildly-flavored liquid in order to be enjoyed. Independent of all my absinthe-related realizations, we fortuitously discovered that Tarkhun and Birch Tree Juice complemented each other very well and made an actually tolerable, even enjoyable cocktail (5/10).

Natural

Birch Tree Juice (4/10)


Birch sap, much like maple sap (used to make maple syrup) is collected by drilling small holes in young birch trees and by letting the sap drip out into a bottle. It contains water, enzymes, proteins, amino acids and sugars and is considered a healthy tonic. On its own it tastes like sugar water.

Kvas (8/10)


This is a fermented drink derived from rye or rye bread. It is very dark brown in color and tastes a bit like carbonated yeast. "Kvas" is derived from the word "acid" in Polish and the origin of the drink dates to 5000 years, around the same time humans discovered beer.

Although it contains up to 1.4% alcohol, Kvas is considered suitable for children. It is popular in all post-soviet republics and is ubiquitous in Eastern European groceries and restaurants. Kvas is similar to non-alcoholic beer.


In the spirit of Russian feasts, we "chased" our fabulous drinks with sumptuous red caviar sandwiches.




All of the above can be procured at most Russian/Ukranian/Eastern Bloc food stores, such as:
B & B International Food @ 12-17 River Rd Fair Lawn, NJ or
Net Cost Market @ 608 Sheepshead Bay Rd, Brooklyn, NY 11224 Continue...

Grasshoppers, Huitlacoche, Cactus Fries @ Toloache (251 W. 50th Street)

The other day we ventured out beyond our biggest fears by going to a restaurant that had grasshoppers on its regular menu. We figured if we want to be taken seriously as a Weird Food Club, we have to have tried at least 1 insect in our lives.



Yes, grasshoppers are horribly scary-looking, but not that much worse than crawfish (if you think about it), and people in Oaxaca, Mexico eat them like popcorn. Besides, they're a great source of protein!

So we asked for a bowl of crunchy grasshoppers as a starter at Toloache.

In this picture, Rob demonstrates how tiny the little fried buggers were. They were so small we could barely see the head and the legs, which made it that much easier to put them in our mouths and swallow. They were very crunchy and sour (we debated whether that was the actual taste of grasshopper guts or just lime juice).

We also got 2 portions of the grasshopper stuffing used in Toloache's tacos, fruit guacamole, cactus fries, avocado fries and Huitlacoche.

Grasshopper Taco Stuffing (4/10): was hot, moist, and even more sour than the dried grasshoppers. The cooking and stirring of the stuffing chopped up the grasshoppers into smaller pieces, so it was difficult to find one with its legs and head intact. We had to spoon the stuffing onto our chips and eat it like a choppy paste. You could only sometimes detect a crunch of a leg, but the stuffing was mostly uniformly hot, moist and incredibly limey.

I've learned that eating insects is not so bad, and I'm going to continue my search for bigger and scarier insects in New York (comment if you know where I could get some!)

Cactus Fries (6/10): tasted just like you'd expect cactus to taste - a little bit like aloe in texture, and somewhat tasteless.

Avocado Fries (8/10): this was a lesson that everything can be deep fried... and occasionally come out amazing. Avocado fries were more succulent and flavorful than cactus fries.

Fruit Guacamole (9/10): the individual ingredients were not unusual at all - avocado, strawberries and pomegranate seeds, but the combination was absolutely heavenly.

"You don't like this? It tastes like truffles!"

Huitlacoche (2/10): literally means "raven shit" in Nahuatl, and is sometimes referred to as "corn smut". Both of those names are exceptionally appetizing so there was no way we'd pass on it.

It smelled like sweaty socks. And the texture was pretty... shitty. If it smelled like excrement with the same texture, I probably wouldn't be able to eat it. But I could do "shit texture" plus "smell of dirty socks" for a couple of bites.

Huitlacoche was almost as bad as natto (the worst food I've ever tried). Ok, to be fair, huitlacoche had more of a rotten mushroom texture - a little bit chewy and sometimes gooey.

I had 2 spoon-fulls of huitlacoche on a piece of tostada chip, while Felix was swallowing the stuff like it was jam! He said it tasted like truffles. I've never had truffles so I can't compare the taste/texture/smell, but if it's anything like huitlacoche, I'll need to organize a Weird Food Club outing just for truffles.

Luckily for us in the States, the demand for huitlacoche among high end restaurants is growing and the USDA recently allowed some farmers in Florida and Pennsylvania to intentionally infect corn with huitlacoche. There shouldn't be any shortage of it any time soon!

Continue...

Pork: The Other White Cheek

Sure, there are pork chops, bacon, and even pork brain Mexican food, but none are finer than pork cheek.

My girlfriend and I dined at Thomas Beisl, which serves up some classic Austrian dishes at respectable prices.

For starters, get the chicken liver terrine w/ cranberry compote. A word of caution: it’s very rich and since my girlfriend is not the pate type, I was forced to gorge on this heavy concoction which I could have used less of. In other words, it’s necessary to share, ideally with three or four people, but two will work if you have a craving and plenty of bread, which your server will bring you at will.

Then, finally, with great anticipation, came the cheek. It was succulent and delightful. It had a that fatty pork taste, like a pork chop, but even more tender. It was served over sauerkraut which was essential for my enjoyment of this dish. Overall, it was absolutely delightful.

Rating (1-10)

6 for the terrine, 9 for the cheek.

Continue...

I’ll Have the Other Duck

Geoduck (gooey –duck) is not really duck at all but a large, strange-looking freshwater calm indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. Mirugai, as it is known in Japan, is hard to find in the city, I was excited when my girlfriend took me to Soto as a surprise.

Soto is perhaps one of the best (and affordable) sushi restaurants in NYC and my new favorite. It’s not Masa and it’s by no means cheap, close to $100 for two, but considering the quality and relatively inexpensive pricing, it was well worth it. I preferred the atmosphere here to Megu’s gaudy space, and the service was satisfactory.

Aside from the incredible freshness of everything served, the most exciting part of the evening was when the Mirugai came. With a texture like squid, and natural flavor masked by the sauce, it wasn’t the sashimi experience I had hoped for, but it was fantastic none-the-less.

The Mirugai earns an 8/10.

Continue...

Alligator at Mara's Homemade (342 E. 6th Street)

In a long row of Indian places on E. 6th street, Mara’s Homemade can easily be missed. But this small place that serves Cajun specialties deserves some attention, at least for the fact that its regular menu lists alligator.


Gator Bites 6/10
Gator Bites is an $11 appetizer that is easily shareable among 3-4 people. The gator bites consisted of small pieces of white Louisiana alligator meat marinated in a Cajun sauce, dusted in seasoned cornmeal, fried and served with Remoulade Sauce for dipping. Our waitress informed us that the alligator is shipped from Louisiana, fresh, and is deep fried on premises.

The bites looked and tasted like chicken nuggets, but were slightly smaller in size and a bit tougher and sinewy in texture. They went very well with beer.


Fried Pickles 7/10
Fried Pickles ($6) were prepared and served the same way as the alligator bites. I was actually more in love with the fried pickles than the alligator. The pickles were deliciously sour, and that burst of flavor was a real surprise each time you bit into something deep fried because our brains are trained to expect some kind of meat rather than a pickle in breaded/deep-fried form.


Crawfish, the southern name for crayfish 6/10
Crayfish/crawdads/crawfish are freshwater crustaceans resembling small lobsters, to which they are related. 98% of crayfish harvested in the US come from Louisiana, where the standard culinary terms are crawfish or ecrevisses. Louisiana crawfish are boiled live in a large pot with heavy seasoning (salt, cayenne pepper, lemon, garlic, bay leaves, etc.) The crawfish at Mara’s Homemade were as red-hot as they looked. They were unbearably spicy but really fun to play with. I personally liked to dangle them by their little feelers and looking them in the eyes before eating them. They look like tiny lobsters the size of shrimp, and are really good in $16 crawfish cheesecake (quiche with pieces of crawfish) but not so great on their own.

Continue...

Congee Village Part 2

To follow up on our previous post, more needs to be said about
Congee Village (100 Allen Street). Congee Village is a goldmine for the culinary adventure seeker. Half of their menu consisting of 250 original Chinese Cantonese dishes should be listed on this blog. Duck Tongues and Congealed Duck Blood featured earlier are just scratching the surface of the ridiculously long list of bizarre items that they serve daily:

Sea Cucumber, Abalone (sea snails), Geoduck, Conch, Live Shrimp
Duck’s Blood, Pig’s Blood Porridge
Shark Fin Soup, Turtle Soup
Bird’s Nest
Frog
Roasted young pigeon
Goose Web (goose feet)
Jelly Fish
Duck Tongue
Goose Intestine, Baked Fish Intestine in Clay Pot (which must taste a lot like kani miso – crab intestines)
Pork Stomach, Pork Stomach Porridge


Duck Tongues
Our greatest surprise was that duck tongue had a little bone in it, and overall didn’t taste that great. While I am a huge fan of cow tongue, duck tongue tasted nothing like it. We preferred the taste of goose intestines to the duck tongue!

"Eating duck tongue feels like you're making out with a duck"

Alex of www.guanabee.com and veteran Weird Food Club member felt like she was “making out with a duck” and found it so freaky she couldn’t have more than one. I was able to swallow 5 tongues, and Arseny laid waste to about 10 tongues.


Pig’s Blood Porridge
This rice porridge with floating cubes of congealed blood tasted similar to the duck blood dish described earlier. The cubes had a defined iron taste to them, and were fairly inedible. If you like blood sausage, it doesn't mean you'll like this.

Kevin believes duck blood is almost as bad as kani miso, the worst thing he has ever tried. I would like to nominate natto to the “worst thing I’ve ever tried” contest. Eating natto feels like you’re chewing on excrement. Apparently, we’re not the first to nominate these two items as the worst food ever. This lively discussion is way ahead of us.


Shark Fin Soup
We intended to get the $13.95 bowl of shark fin soup, but we were accidentally given a $45 bowl of “supreme” shark fin soup. There may be a subtle difference between the supreme and the poor-man’s shark fin soup, but we certainly couldn’t tell them apart.

Shark fin soup is considered a luxury dish in Chinese culture and is served at special occasions like weddings. Like many unusual things I’ve tried (jellyfish, bull penis, sea cucumber), shark fin has very little flavor of its own and is used for its noodle-like texture and ability to absorb flavors from soup broth and sauces, as well as for its rarity.

The practice of shark finning is controversial due to its brutality and its contribution to global decline of many shark species. Shark fins are removed from the shark and the rest of the still living shark is thrown into the ocean. The finless sharks are unable to swim, sink to the ocean floor and die.

If ever faced with the choice to get shark fin soup, we do not recommend that you get it. The taste, texture and the entire experience do not justify supporting the shark finning industry. I truly regret that I tried it.
Additionally, shark fin contains high levels of mercury and is dangerous for young children, pregnant women and may cause male sterility… so that makes it really not worth it!

Conclusion:
Congee Village is a place to check off a bunch of crazy food on your “to try” list, but none of it was a truly satisfying experience. Our best advice is don’t order just the weird stuff at Congee Village, unless you want to leave hungry. Continue...