Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Having eaten our way through many spots of both fancy schmancy and hole-in-the-wall varieties, we were left in no doubt of the culinary charms of Toronto. I must say that this city would definitely benefit from one reliable Sietsema-type reviewer though. (I urgently recommend Sietsema to begin research on a Toronto version of his books like 'Good and Cheap Ethnic Eats in New York City': he would have a field day in Toronto no doubt). You can easily find short, vague reviews on sites like Torontoplus or Toronto-ourfaves.com, but the best bet is to google the cuisine or restaurant you're interested in with 'Now magazine'. But not even Now has a complete (or completely reliable) catalogue of the city's offerings. And trying to figure something out from Chowhound is like playing darts in the dark. Oh la! Nothing to do but make sure you have a few reliable recommendations if your time in Toronto is limited.

Toronto's circa 220,000 strong Jamaican community largely came to the city after various dubious immigration policies ended in the '60s. Some of these immigrants contributed to Toronto’s hip hop, reggae, rocksteady, soul and funk scenes since the late ‘60s: including Jackie Mittoo and veterans of the Studio One and Trojan labels. Today the legacy continues with people like Kardinal Offishall, Canada's premier hip hop artist, who brings reggae roots into his beats.

Speaking of roots & beets (bada boom!), of course the West Indian community also brought with them some culinary fiyah. Albert Wiggon came to Toronto the mid 1970s, first as a factory worker, but by age 18 saving profit to open up his own business and practise the kitchen secrets taught him by his mother. His restaurant on St. Clair Avenue West spawned the smaller branch on Queen West West.

Albert's was the spot generally recommended to us by Torontonians of Jamaican descent. For me the allspiced rice 'n' peas and oxtail gravy (always ask for extra!) outshone the actual chicken, which was juicy and falling off the bone (island-style), but we should have got spicier (there's hotsauce on the counter).

Albert's also got the thumbs up from the New Yorkers who were in town. It was from Harlem-based DJ/writer Chairman Mao that I learned how to order the ultimate late night drunk food: a patty (or two, if you're a boy) on coco bread.

Jamaicans.com says

Ah, a warm, buttered piece of coco bread and a sandy beach... no one could ask for much more than that."

Fair enough, if eating a soft, white oversize hamburger bun on the beach is what you're into. And if that's your ting, along with your patty-on-coco-bread, you drink a bottle of grapefruit flavoured -yes - Ting.

The spicy meaty warmth of the patty and its pie-like suet pastry shell, the fluffiness of the bread soaking up the spice and the juice, the sting of the ting, combine to make it a late night drunken treat par excellence. And it's not bad by daylight either.

(Here is a recipe for a vegan version of patties with coco bread).





Next time we're in the vicinity of Albert's, I hope to try an oxtail dinner with caramelized plantain, salt-cod fritters, gongo-pea soup and dumplings with gravy.


Albert's Real Jamaican Foods

542 St Clair Avenue West
Toronto - (416) 658-9445

558 Queen Street West (tell the cab driver Queen and Bathurst)
Toronto, ON M5V 2B5, Canada
(416) 304-0767

Regrets, I've had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do, and saw it through without exemption
I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway
But more, much more than this, I did it my way

OK, when it comes to our dining choices in NY I pretty much did it Sietsema's way. And in one particular case, it may not have been the BEST way. There was a tinge of regret when I made the mistake of checking up on Oversea Asian on Chowhound.com. On that website, the legions seem to prefer another Manhattan Malaysian joint. Which lead me to wonder for a moment, if I should've done it Skyway.

But then I thought back on the delicious sweet-sour mango chicken, the flaky, buttery roti canai (so it probably is pre-frozen, so what?), and the melange of nasi lemak flavours and I was at peace.



It IS still a lingering regret that we didn't have time to explore Sietsema's recommendations of Malaysian and other 'asian cuisines in the outer boroughs. I have a certain stubborn idea (similiar to Maytel and Hock's) that restaurants should be humble and obscure, that the 'real' and best Asian food would be found only in Queens or even New Jersey and never in Manhattan. (I have Sietsema to thank for this prejudice, too). So I have shovelled all regrets aside, since i figure Skyway is just another Manhattan joint, after all...

Must admit, I do find it bewildering and somehow irritating to broach the seething mass of conflicting ideas on Chowhound about which restaurant is 'best'... most of them write in a way that is so earnest and humourless and often seems so ill-informed.

Still, one is inclined to think that some of them must have a good idea about what's good to eat.

The brave legions of Chowhound posters have quite a task on their hands. In NYC (as in Tokyo) there are SO many places that are good to eat. Some of them are only good for one or two dishes, and some of them decline in quality within months while new ones pop up every day.

To try to define what is 'best' is a virtual impossibility, because when there are so many options, 'best' depends on what you feel like that day, doesn't it?

I found this blog whereby a person spent a year eating their way around the world, and then summed up their top fives in various categories. Some of the places and dishes sound worth trying out, but the lack of scientific approach and the profusion of locations and cuisines makes it all seem rather random. Since it could take decades of living in a certain country to become an expert on a cuisine, it is bewildering to see someone try to come off like an expert on Napolitano pizza just from having passed through there for a week or two. This, dear friends, is the nature of our day & age. Foodism, dear friends, is at work everywhere you look.

Anyways. No matter how you get your info, the main point is to find delicious meals.

There are two options in a big city like NYC. You could spend two weeks blocking out all the eateries from a certain cuisine and eating your way through all of them. Or you could make a virtual career out of trialing places that you've seen recommended on the web. For instance, I found this site by an enthusiastic eater who made a shortlist of places she wanted to try out in NYC culled from Sietsema's recommendations - and then cross-referenced with Chowhound and a cabbie food-blogger. I must say that we enjoyed every single meal recommended by Sietsema. But I suspect - foodism irritations aside - that if I lived in NYC I would resort to a similar strategy.

OK, so enough rambling. I am NOT an expert on Malaysian food. For some reason there is a lot of really good Malaysian food in Wellington, NZ, where I grew up. As take out it's more of a tradition among people I knew than Thai or even Chinese, so it reminds me of being 16 and eating searing egg sambal.

One of the things that impressed me about Oversea Asian was the freshness and tastiness of the vegetables that were involved. Mango chicken:





I wished the Nasi Lemak had been a bit less dry & a bit more coconutty (like the superb coconut rice we had at Village Mingala the night before - but that was a Burmese restaurant so I shouldn't confuse the matter! The achat (sweet/spicy/sour pickled veges) that came with it were great and the general confluence of tastes and textures was very satisying.



Above you can see Yeong Tofu, the dish that enticed us to Oversea Asian in the first place. Here is the description by Sietsema:
"It might be the name of a prime-time soap, set in an organic supermarket and featuring a cast of glib twentysomethings: Young Tofu. Instead, it designates a clay pot that sits steaming in front of you, a collection of stuffed objects in a curried coconut broth ($5.25). Bulging with shrimp-laced tofu paste, the okra, eggplant, and long green chiles sink to the bottom, while Venetian barges of fried and unfried tofu float lazily by. This liquid museum of curd would have made a complete meal in itself, had the bewildering, 150-item menu not tempted you to stick your neck out further."
(Read the full review here: it's from '04, mind)

The crispy fried tofu skin with the creamy broth was superb. (We chose half chicken broth and half laksa-style curry mixed). 'Yeong' in cantonese means to stuff. So Yeong Tofu means veges stuffed with tofu, and the dish also included pieces of eggplant welded with fishpaste that tasted a little musty like the back of the shelf in an old chinese supermarket: but in a good way.



The roti canai was very good, the accompanying curry with hunks of meat very tasty.

Overall, it was a delicious and over-the-top lunch (so much food!) washed down with plenty of tea and nice before strolling to Alife so Erik could buy a purple sweater.

It may not have been THE best Malaysian NYC has to offer, but it was very good, and it made me wish there were more Overseas Asians in Germany. I would be very happy if this restaurant existed in Cologne.

As a point of consolation for those of us who don't have the option of being in close proximity to the Italian food of the Bronx, the Asian spots in Queens and the Latin American food of Jackson Heights simultaneously, I just read the following inspiring comment by one Malaysian blogger:
"I used to drive 5 hours to find good Chinese or Singaporean or Malaysian food. Now I prefer to spend 5 hours preparing it myself."

If you, too, feel a dearth of Malaysian food in your life, this is a recipe for Yeong Tofu. Give it a shot!

A customer contemplates the qualities of a good nasi lemak:

We did really well on this trip to NYC, all thanks to Village Voice restaurant critic Robert Sietsema. Nary a bad mouthful passed through our gullets. The only sadness was that we couldn't manage to eat two big main meals per day.

A definite highlight was Hill Country Barbecue, located a block west of Madison Square Park, in a block that at night time is dark, stark and does not feel that it will offer up any delights. However, it does.

Read Sietsema's admirable review of Hill Country

If you can stand the fact that Hill Country is a loud, brash, almost Disneyland-ish BBQ experience, you will love it. We actually saw a father & son arrive for dinner in ten gallon hats. Hill Country is styled after the beloved Texas Kreuz Market, right down to the bathrooms downstairs which are fitted out to resemble wooden outhouses (within a separate Ladies room of course). There was NFL playing on TV screens, loud music on the sound system, and a gimmicky system whereby you take your order card to the 'stalls' of the barbecue 'market' and when someone shouts to you that you are next in the queue of (mostly white) customers, you shout to the (mostly African American) 'pitmasters' that you would like a quarter pound each of lean brisket and moist brisket with white bread (scrupulously following Sietsema's directive), and they pull out smoky meat from black iron-lidded brick holding bins (the hulking metal Ole Hickory pits, each of which has a smoking capacity of 1000lbs of meat, are visible beyond some glass doors), and plopped onto a twist of butcher paper on a plastic tray. Then you get your sides from the next stall, then you pay at the cashier. If you want to get a table in the pleasant noisy warmth upstairs or at the long communal tables downstairs, where the bands play and where there are happy hours for Jack Daniels, you're best to book. There seem to be some nice music booked there, like The Poor Man's Roses, a Brooklyn-based Patsy Cline tribute band. We were able to get a table on the street right away without a reservation, which was fine for us, though the mix of NYC hubbub and Texas smells inside would be worth booking for. The black-people-serving-white-people thing made me a bit uncomfortable but everybody seemed pretty happy with their jobs and the atmosphere was nothing less than congenial.
The ordering system was quite hectic and we were glad to know ahead what we should choose.

We loved the moist-and-lean brisket eaten together on white bread, so soft, greasy, smoky, floppy-tender and delicous. Unlike any beef experience we'd ever had. The pork ribs were better with a little of the sauce in the bottle at the table.



The corn pudding was indeed wonderful. A savoury sort of souffle with a deep corn flavour and touch of sweetness from the corn with slightly crunchy crust, we agreed with Sietsema that it was the best of the sides – Erik also liked the skillet corn bread though I found it too sweet and tasted somewhat of baking soda. I did also like the sweet potato mash with bourbon.



Looks like baby poo, tastes delicious. I am a maniac about almost anything involving sweet potatoes, though, and most things with a sloppy pureed or mashed consistency. The Cool As A Cucumber salad (ordered as a gesture towards green food) was ok. Beware of ordering too much... it might not seem like much, but a half-pound of meat plus one side is more than enough per person... I wished I'd had room for the peach & blackberry cobbler.

What heaven looks like:





Hill Country
30 West 26th Street
(212) 255-4544

More photos of Hill Country, including the Ole Hickory pits.

For a while now I've been reading the columns of Village Voice writer Robert Sietsema. He is absolutely one of my favourite writers, partly because like fellow V-Voicers Nina Lalli and Lynn Yaeger he can use a word like 'dope' without any awkwardness. He can be Jeffrey Steingarten-esque, a goliath. But you still get the feeling he wears hoodies and has a friendly pair of spectacles. Maybe that's the sign of a good food critic. They might know when to call a Nepalese restaurant on the authenticity of their dishes, but they are a sort of everyman. Sietsema is a food critic Zelig.

When in NYC we followed a trail of his restaurant recommendations. It never really occurred to me that he might be in one of those restaurants. We look through his eyes, so to us he exists as a meta-text. When I looked around Paris Sandwich in Chinatown though, I thought that going by his reviews alone, he could be that precocious 16 year old Vietnamese b-boy waiting for a sandwich. He could just as easily be that 30-something bookish-looking African American gentleman. His reviews hint that he has many friends from many cultural backgrounds. In this week's Voice he describes hunting for the perfect Taco, and says: "Included in our number were an attorney, a cheese-monger, some students from Sarah Lawrence College, a chanteuse, a tutor, a historian, and a newspaper real-estate editor. Several of us thankfully possessed an idiomatic command of Spanish." Sietsema knows everybody, and he talks to everybody.

Anyway, just having fun with the idea of Sietsema. I suppose that most people outside of NYC have not heard of him, and yet in NYC his columns and publications are regularly spread all over the city. Everybody in NYC knows him. But, to paraphrase Howard Moon, do they REALLY know him?

When you're in a city for only four nights, you just don't want to risk a bad meal. You need to know exactly where to go for Malaysian or Ecuadorian. This doesn't leave you much basis for comparison or ability to judge whether your favourite reviewer's tastes are truly meritorious.

There were times when I disagreed slightly with Mr. Sietsema. In his review of Paris Sandwich he said "the crusty loaf is the star": well, I wouldn't have gone that far. It was crumbly and just ok, and nothing Parisian about it. But again, I have no basis of NYC-offerings for comparison. Another petty point to haggle over was his feeling that the 'vegetarian chicken', greasy tempeh, was closer to pork in taste. I thought it was kinda chicken-ish. Anyway, all that's beside the point. Overall, it was very yummy! The hot lemonade with salt was good, and the green tea waffle was dope too. ("You don't need no hope, all you need is...")

I preferred the tempeh to the sweet BBQ pork. We really enjoyed our sandwiches, and if we are back to NYC anytime soon will definitely go there again and go the whole hog: the baguette with pate, pigs' ears and 'head cheese'.

We tried following a few other online recommendations for NYC too – some New Yorker readers' recommendations from the Zucchini & Chocolate blog – those didn't hold up so well. My feeling is, if you are travelling to New York, and like the kind of food I do, it's better not to trust recommendations from anybody except the guy who Nina Lalli calls "Our Man Sietsema".





Paris Sandwich
113 Mott Street
212-226-7221