Stomachs on legs are proud to present

The New York Daily News reported on an interesting case of nuns versus their fish-smoking neighbors...

The "foul" and "noxious" odors coming from Michael and Gloria Lim's E. 19th St. apartment once got so overpowering that building workers feared there was a dead body inside, according to the suit filed by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

Called in to see what caused the stench, firefighters pounded on the door for several minutes before forcing their way into the 16th-floor apartment, only to discover Gloria Lim smoking and drying fish.

The nuns are so upset about it that they are filing a lawsuit for $75,000 in damages. Luckily, another neighbor is a bit more level-headed about it...

"It's not a dead body, it's just smelly fish frying in oil on a stove top," the neighbor said.

Still, he said, it's a smell he could do without.

"I don't like the smell and I wish it weren't there," the neighbor said. "But I do think you're allowed to cook smelly fish, right?"

Image from Seema K K's Flickr stream, of smoked fish on display in Meghalaya, India.

We're nearly at the end of recounting meals eaten in New York. So hold tight. WD50 is the last on the list I think, but I'm leaving the interpretation of that astonishing meal to Hock.

So...a night out close to our last days in New York.

My restaurant of choice was Kyotofu.

I had read about it somewhere and thought rhetorically, what's not to like? I like tofu, I like sake.

It was my choice given that I had willingly sacrificed all my hard work at the gym to follow Hock on his burger/ pizza tour of NYC. And despite the fact that we were leaving to Tokyo within a matter of hours, I felt my digestion system couldn't wait for healthy pan-Asian treats.

We arrived and ordered a sample plate of the mains on offer and a sake sampler.





And a large quivering mass of tofu.


We then ordered a huge bottle of sake and silliness and hunger ensued.

The sampler and tofu weren't enough for four people so we decided to order extra of the samples which everyone liked. Unexpectedly, it wasn't tofu.

At this point tofu ceased to suffice as a drinking snack. We gave up and ordered full portions of the sausages and eel.



My stomach groaned. I'd promised it tofu and spring water and instead showered it with sausages and sake.

Things only got worse after an outrageous kareoke evening, and a taco truck on the upper west side at 2 am.

My digestive system and I are slowly regaining trust in one another, but its a relationship that may take some time to mend

So when you go to Shake Shack and stand in line for 30 mins to an hour and finally order your order hamburger, shroom burger, and frozen custard.... and before the staff hand you over the vibrating electronic device that "shakes" when your order is ready....ummmm.......you might want to try doing a little shake yourself a la Homer Simpson. If for instance, you wiggle yourself and your fat continues to wobble say five to ten seconds after you've stopped exerting yourself......well you might want to rethink your lunch choice, just saying...you know...for your health and vitality.



I'm not being mean, just honest, really.

If your wobbles are minor to non-existent, if say you are a Japanese tourist, go for it. Get the lot, guzzle down a shake burger, fries and custard. Why not try a shake shack shake too while your at it. I'm sure the shakes are great.

If however, your not quite hideously obese but could stand to loose a few squishy bits, as in my case, and if you promise to atone big time, then my advice is skip the fries, (they're just fried potatoes you know, you can live without them) order a 'shroom burger and share a small tub of frozen custard. Hock's shake burger is just a burger in my view, but the 'shroom burger was crispy mushroomy, cheesy and good. The frozen custard was dense and delicious. Follow with brisk walks all over NYC.

Through a post on Gothamist today, I found my new favorite food blogger: Franklin of Franklin on Food.

Franklin, a student at tech-friendly CIS 339 middle school in The Bronx, is the official cafeteria food critic for his school's aptly named student blog, The 339 Hardline. I appreciate his synthetic method-- part personal testimony, part man-on-the-street interview, plus his latest efforts heave with the gravitas which only quantitative data can give them.

I only wished he posted more frequently.

I should probably also add that the 7th and 8th graders who write for The 339 Hardline are more engaging than what I usually find myself reading when I am supposed to be working.

Have you noticed since the global economic crisis how magazines and op-eds in lifestyle sections of web pages and other glossies have begun re-spinning the activities of poor people into the new "it" thing, so staying in is the new going out, hillbilly is the new hipster (note to plaid wearers) and locally brewed beer is the new champagne.

So picnics are the new brunch. Who said? Me.....why spend $50 bucks in NYC or more on a flashy brunch when you can sit in the park in Brooklyn, possibly get arrested for drinking a beer in public and eat hotdogs, broccoli rabe and mozzarella sandwiches, jamaican meat pies and drink organic cola and beer.









The best spot in the park, next to the public loos naturally (or "comfort station" as it was so prudishly named). You can even fall asleep in the sun on the grass, something you can't do at a fancy schmancy restaurant. Other people's children are far less annoying in a park.



Here's our hillbilly/hipster picnic



What comes next I wonder? Will Polish be the new French or Spanish? Polyester the new cotton? Fingers the new cutlery? Poor the new rich? Once again I find myself at the forefront of cutting edge trends. Lucky me.

After Maytel's amusing panning of Chez Panisse et al, I couldn't resist adding the above photo, which comes from the New York Times this week. It's an image from a Berkeley kindergarten. I love how sushi makes it onto the kindergarten radar.

Locavore is a word that has always made me shiver a bit: needlessly labeling a one-dimensional aspect of being a consumer.

Anyway, Robert Sietsema's first installment of his series on eating locally and cheaply (if not organically) in NYC, is quite interesting.
And his motivations are laudable. Down with ten dollar chops, I say! (They remind me too much of New Zealand).

Here's a new idea....Chez Panisse is passé

GASP!!!!!!!

I took the train to Berkeley, less than two hours from Davis towards San Francisco. I checked in at the French hotel and dined in the restaurant across the street. We are talking about Alice Waters’ place, Chez Panisse a restaurant well known to the readers of this blog and in-flight magazines.

There is the formal restaurant downstairs (fully booked) and the café upstairs (a late table was available). I had wine made of Zinfandel grapes.

I took the US$29 fixed menu. It had a garden lettuce salad, spaghetti alla Norma with eggplant, tomato, basil, and ricotta salata, and a Concord grape sherbet with roasted Thompson seedless grapes and langues de chat.

These were the variety names on today’s menu: Concord grape, Thompson seedless grapes, and Little Gems lettuce.

And these were the farm names on the menu: Cannard Farm3, Andante Dairy, Soul Food Farm, Marin Sun Farm, Lagier Ranches, and Frog Hollow Farm.

Terroir trumps agrobiodiversity at Alice’s place.

It is a good restaurant. It is very French. The waiter spoke of terroir as if his name were Claude Duchateu. It is very cheap for a famous restaurant. It has a local twist to it. The food is good. But is mainstream now. The menu in the Davis Best Western Palm Court was not that different.

I suppose it is fair what everybody says, that Alice created some sort of revolution. From the wasteland of the American diner to Good Food. Just like her neighbor Alfred Peet transformed mainstream American coffee from diluted sewage to the best coffee anywhere save (perhaps) Italy. But that is ancient history.

But, just for your information, Chez Panisse is passé now. Go look somewhere else. I have heard of an underground restaurant movement in New York.

Chez Panisse is sold out every night, I think. Alice can experiment. But she does not. She chooses the middle of the road. Their produce comes from “farms, ranches, and fisheries guided by principles of sustainability” but the majority of entrees (main dishes) are a fish or meat dish.

Chuck out the meat. Serve different varieties of other veggies than tomatoes (even the Andronico’s supermarket across the street sells heirlooms). Use something locally evolved rather than merely locally grown. The native Californians used hundreds of edible plants.4 But no miner’s lettuce or acorns on the menu of the Queen of Slow Food. Come on, Alice, surprise me!

Source: Robert Hijmans Agricultural Biodiversity Website

Hmmm, so where can slow food and "locavores" go from here? A good point indeed since the restaurant business is so competitive one does need to constantly be redefining ones niche in order to add novelty and therefore value. It is essential to maintain the buzz.....and with more and more restaurants serving Alice Watery style menus.....such as Applewood in Brooklyn I'd have to agree with Robert.




The meal we had here was not astounding. While everything was well cooked and tasted nice it was simple and I must say that aside from the price tag there was precious little appreciation to be had in eating organic local beets and salad. The food was good, or better yet "nice".

Applewood, like Chez Panisse is a farmer to restaurant type deal. There is organic/ fairtrade hand wash in the bathrooms and the tables were adorned with vases of fresh cut thyme which I snapped off "a la Thai style" and added to my under-seasoned beef tartar (I asked for extra chili but they wouldn't give it to me)

The bill around USD$80 including wine.

I had beets, the tartar and "artisinal cheese selection" to finish

Beets


Beef


Cheese


I was too busy talking to notice what other people ate....but here are some other photos

Delicious selection of handmade butters and dips to start


Maine Lobster thingy


???


???


???


Chocolate Ding Dong, as Hock likes to call them....always a crowd pleaser


So now that most inner city hipster regions of the United States now have their very own version of Chez Panisse what happens?

How much more "in touch" can this restaurant niche get? Should restaurants of this theme, as Robert suggests, go deeper still attaching perhaps scientific names to the menu and explaining the role your food played in an ecosystem? Should they only allow diners to eat a limited portion of meat? Perhaps they should only be cooking off the menu of under-utilised species in line with the principle that eating endangered species is the best way to preserve them.


With some quarters of food criticism already underway against molecular gastronomy , should Alice Watery restaurants be moving towards more sophisticated cooking techniques or furthering the general populaces' appreciation for quinoa?

Or hows about molecular Khmer food....anyone?

Working for three years in Cambodia can leave you feeling a little detached from the outside world.

When it comes to your own growth as a professional chef I can’t stress enough how important the inspiration that you receive from your fellow peers is.

Simple things that you might take for granted when living in a more developed country did not exist for me in Cambodia when I worked there. Taking the time to visit suppliers (local markets were awesome in their own right but I am talking more about the more modern food movement) or reading food magazines were pretty much out for me. Parcels from my folks via the Khmer mailing system would take months to arrive, so a glossy magazine with pretty pictures of food were out too. You could pretty much forget about attending food expos and dining at others restaurants. Let alone the simple pleasure of meeting up with like minded cooks at a local bar after a difficult days service and drinking the night away while discussing the differences in an egg cooked at 63°C versus one cooked at 64.5°C. All very exciting and important stuff but an after work conversation was more likely to be on the lines of “Hey Pascal where the fuck can I get some butter? You got any butter? Don’t lie to me now, Sophea said you had some”

Luckily I was surrounded by a few (read two other chefs) and I was lucky enough to work with one of them . The French national "Jo". (check out his second cook book here his first is only available in French)




Sure we created some cool stuff, that we are both still proud of.


That both didn't stop us at the time from wanting to know how did that crazy little fucking Spanish chef do that?

While valium, xanax, heroin and mangosteens were readily available to us, Iota, xanthan or methocellulose was not.

My only real contact with the international cooking scene was through a very slow slow and unreliable internet connection (Think $300 USD a month for a service barely faster than dial up).

That’s when I came across Ideas in Food.

Thankfully because of Aki’s and Alex’s generous sharing of ideas via their blog from early ‘05 until now it has allowed me to feel as though I might be able have a small understanding of the latest techniques floating around the culinary world.

So whilst in NYC, why not take the F train from Manhattan and spend a day catching up on some new techniques?

So it came to pass that when Maytel and I decided to go to New York for a holiday I would take a day off from eating oysters, hamburgers and the likes and spend the day in Queens.

So like a true fanboy, I found myself mid morning inside the cutest little house on the sweetest little street about million miles away from the complete normaility of life in Bangkok, the city that I currently call home. I spent an amazing, eye-opening six hours with two extremely lovely and passionate people.



When I arrived we chatted over donuts and coffee about this and that, then Alex plated up an incredibly pure tasting artichoke dish that he had been working on, this set the tune for what really was an amazing day.



From this tiny, but crazily-equipped, kitchen we ran through the topics that I really wanted to become more familair with.









Some whipped products. No, those are not egg whites.





To some fruit glueing.











Like all good chefs they offered the perfect lunch.



Then we ended the day with some other variations on pectin.



What I loved about watching Alex work was other than the fact that he was mad excitable, he also couldn't help but let his true chefiness slip out. Although we both tried to be on our best behaviour as this was the first time we had met face to face Alex was swearing like a trooper towards the end of our session. I have worked in four different countries and all chefs seem to behave the same way if not for swearing then maybe a good dick joke, why is that?

Alex and Aki were right. After the days class was through my way of thinking about food would be different. They could not have been more right.

The days experimenting wasn't perfect mind you.

After not allowing the above pectin bath to cool properly the little sauce orbs didn't come out the way they should have. "Don't do that, wait for the bath to cool" was Alex's advice.

"Do you make many mistakes or have many failures?" I asked.

"I fuck up all the time" he replied.

I personally hope to be fucking up over the next two months and have high hopes for next year too.

Here is the shopping list that I am currently working on.

Activa YG
Liquid Nitrogen local supply?
Liquid Nitrogen Dewar small shallow dish
Liquid Nitrogen Dewar holding 25 - 30 ltrs
Pacojet coup Blade set
New and larger chamber vacuum machine
Plastic acetate strips
Pectin LM
Pectin LMA
Fruit powders
Methocel A15C
Methocel F50 
Maltrin M100 Maltodextrin
Calcium Lactate
Locust Bean Gum
Calcium Glunconate
Calcium Lactate
Carrageenan (Iota)
Carrageenan (Kappa)
Konjac
Kelcogel Gellan Lt-100 (elastic)
Kelcogel Gellan F (Firm)

People have now asked me several times what was the best thing I ate in New York....

And although we ate plenty of great meals, the thing that was a complete revelation to me had to be the pickles...

I've eaten pickles before of course, but the pickles of New York take pickles to a whole other level of pickle goodness



They are crunchy and briny and flavourful, they come free at most Jewish delis

I have since realised that all other pickles I have eaten are but a poor imitation of New York pickles

The best pickle of all was the pickles at 2nd Ave Deli (ups KJ)





Accompanied by a white fish salad and a pastrami sandwich





This is a pretty pricey deli these days, the decor inside is great, but my advice order light and make pickles the focus

This blog post is a purely self gratuitous exhibit designed to elicit jealousy and desire on the part of you, dear reader.

I ate a nova scotia oysters, New England clam chowder, a bucket of "steamers" and a lobster roll at Pearl Oyster Bar, New York. It's a NYC take on a Maine-style seafood restaurant, specialising in Maine lobster rolls.



It's not quite the same as eating it in Maine, but it is as close as I am likely to get this side of the decade.

Ever since I had heard that such a thing as a lobster roll existed I have wanted to eat one. Finally my dream came true. Plus due to the melt down of the global finance system, there were no queues, so we didn't have to wait for a table at peak lunch hour.

Steamers and chowder


I was a little bit perplexed by how to eat the bucket of clams. They came accompanied by a cup of hot water with lemon, what I assumed was olive oil and lemon. Each clam had a weird little penis like appendage on the side covered by a sandy little foreskin....yes, true. I started to fluff around with the objects on the plate when the waitress came over and explained.

you remove the foreskin


hold the penis-thingy and dip in the warm water to clean


then dip in the clarified butter


Then you eat. It's up to you whether you eat the little penis-thingy too. I tried a couple. I guess its not really a penis but it felt weird. I once knew a women who refused to eat anything that had eyes. A weird form of semi-vegetarianism which I believe she may have had to rethink had she been with me on this day and been confronted with tiny clam penises.

Lobster roll


and oysters as dessert



The lobster roll wasn't actually the highlight of the meal, the clams and oysters were. I think I prefer my lobsters plain, steamed and with lemon and not smothered in mayo and couched between soft pillowy bread. Nonetheless I'm happy to have fulfilled another goal in life - eat Maine lobster roll.....tick. The oysters were wonderful, with a much cleaner fresh sea taste than oysters I've eaten down under. Although they erred on the side of salty not sweet oysters, which I generally prefer the overwhelming fresh ocean flavour was as refreshing as a big gulp of icy water. The clams were also great, weird tiny penis aside, they were plump and flavourful. Although I hesitated at first about the idea of dipping them in clarified butter, I rolled with it and can attest to deliciousness. Whoever said that dairy has no place in seafood dishes should go to Pearl Oyster Bar.