Triscribe

Author: F C

  • Reality Affirmative Action, Training from A to 6

    SSW mentioned this fall’s 4-way apartheid Survivor: Cook Islands today. City officials are appropriately outraged, but the question ithat occurs to me is whether there were this many Asians applying for the previous 12 seasons? Amazing Race has 2 Asian teams this year, apparently also to address the reality of the situation. The only Asian American to win a reality show was Dorothy Hui in Anderson Cooper’s The Mole 2 – the Next Betrayal.

    The subway nerds ride the entire system in 24 hours 2 minutes. One of them is a U.Mich law student. More people would consider doing it if there were more restrooms than the measly 70 rooms out of 469 stations currently available. Maybe the people fighting over the above-ground street furniture could also do the subways and save everyone a lot of aggrevation.

  • Food Accidents

    In the second of our Iron Chef themed restaurant outings, we went to Bobby Flay’s sous chef Patricia Yeoh’s restaurant SAPA. We were disappointed. Our waiter failed to give us a bread basket. The food was small, cold and didn’t even match what was on the menu. The environment was so pounding with sounds that we couldn’t hear each other talk. The only thing to say was that the Cosmo-jito was pretty good. Not recommended.

    So, we were still hungry and looking for something to rescue it, say a slice of pizza. Then we thought, where is the nearest Mario Batali restaurant? Otto Enateca at 1 Fifth Avenue was the answer. It’s designed to simulate an Italian train station – you’re given a ticket to an Italian city, and you wait in the waiting room-like bar until your city appears on the tote board. You then are led into another room which appears to look like any train station cafeteria you might see oversees, just nicer. Not much pretense – we ordered 2 pizzas, a salumi salad, and drinks. They came fast, hot and of high quality. And we didn’t break $50 between the 2 of us.

    Cityscape has a number of complaints, mostly about the B&T crowd, and not the restaurant itself. Perhaps because we came off hours, it wasn’t a factor. For me anyway, the ambiance is important, but not as important as the food. If the food is bad, the rest isn’t worth it.

    In other Food Accidents, Alton Brown crashes and burns in his series Feasting on Asphalt, where he and his merry men motor from one coast to the other in search of non-chain restaurant food. If you can imagine Monty Python and the Holy Grail as an informative Food Network show, this would be it. The crash scene happens in episode 4, where he wipes out on camera just outside of Las Vegas, and breaks his clavacle. Ouch!

    The neatest found object from Feasting on Asphalt is the 12V Travel Oven. It looks like a big lunch box, but actually inside are 2 metal trays where you can put food on. You then close the lid and plug it in your cigarette lighter outlet. Sometime later, you have hot food. Convenient for anyone who spends all of their time in the car.

    I’m going to Vegas for my friend’s bachelor party, and thinking of making it an entire West Coast week. Any suggestions welcome…

  • Dragon Boat Bites Back

    Recovering from a rather freak injury Sunday when P and I went to the Dragon Boat festival in Flushing Meadow Park. P got a hold of some chicken and rice (the Carribean kind, not Hainan ‘chicken rice’), and I was chomping down on the drumstick when part of the bone fractured and ended up embedded in the roof of my mouth. It took about half an hour to get the bleeding to stop, but P’s medical training came to the rescue.

    It was pretty sore for the last couple of days, but it’s now starting to heal up. I have to eat soft foods for the moment — I tried to have some salad today, and you wouldn’t believe how painful ribs of lettuce can be when it hits the wound. Using a straw can be a bit of a problem, because in order to position the straw to not hit the injured area, it sometimes ends up squirting the liquid into my lungs. I’m seeing the dentist anyway this Saturday, so I’ll let him look at it. At least it’s not hurting too much anymore.

    The Dragon Boating wasn’t that good this time either. I’ve never seen this happen before in competition, but the referees actually called a foul. Someone in the middle lane dropped their oar in the water. That immediately caused the boat to do a U-turn because of the uneven stroking. One of the refs raised a red flag, then turned their boat around to recover the oar so they could row back to shore.

  • Weekend Roundup

    Hitting 4 out of New York’s 5 boroughs this weekend… I actually published this on Sunday, but I couldn’t get it out of some funky mode…

    Friday: Bought 40 pounds of kal bi (Korean short rib) from Assi Plaza. The stuff comes rock solid. People were doing double takes as we rolled out of the place with the stuff. Since we had an ice chest, we had enough time to go out for dinner.

    We went to Pine Garden Restaurant, 141-43 Northern Blvd., for Korean. It’s a very homey neighborhood place, not like those massive BBQ emporiums such as Kam Gum San. We ordered the Nokcha-yangnyum Galbi for the BBQ, which is black angus rib marinated with the house special green tea sauce. It had a unique sweet taste, and the meat was very lean. We also had Jop Chae and ManDu Goo Yi (pan fried dumplings). Excellent – recommended.

    When we went home, P made a big pot of chilli for the picnic the next day – that took about 3 hours before we went to sleep.

    Saturday: We went to Costco with a bunch of other people from Asian Alumni associations. We walked out of there with $1,000 worth of picnic stuff – 5 shopping carts. Kalbi, fish balls and the chilli were a big hit. We’ll have to cut out more hamburgers and get more drinks though. And NYU wins the tug-of-war for the first year.

    That night, I spent a couple of hours to get rid of the kim chee smell out of the back of the zip car. Wow, that stuff gets really ripe. Note to self: kim chee gets really dangerous when it gets warm – the active cultures puts off a lot of gas that causes the bottle to leak.

    Sunday: Tiger Beer sponsored a Singapore Chili Crab festival in Brooklyn DUMBO – I had two plates this year. The sauce was much milder and more coconut flavored this year, which I preferred. We then made a b-line to P’s sisters place near the GW bus station to walk the doggies. We got them a snow-cone (without flavor) which they really enjoyed.

    Later we went to Galapogos Art Center in Williamsburg to see the Sulu Series, a monthly menagerie of Asian American performing artists curated by Reggie Cabico from NYU APA. It featured a number of spoken word acts, guitarists, and a rapper that needed an audience to film his new music video.

    We went because of Wendy Ip, who was performing and was by far the best act. Wendy’s song “Our Little Room” is now my current favorite. I though she had great technique on keyboard and original lyrics – completely different than everybody else with the sterotypical lone guitar strapped around their necks. She’s something between Carole King and Carole Bayer Sager. I think it was in an interview between Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello where Bacharach said “you don’t have to apologize for being harmonic”. No apologies – Wendy Ip is Recommended.

    Afterwards, we went to Fornino, Michael Aylub’s pizza laboratory down the street and around the corner. Brickoven pizza with organic ingredients works well. Herbs are grown in the back yard, so it is as fresh as it could be. It is slightly thicker than the only other pizza in Brooklyn in the same league, Grimaldi’s. Score: toppings better at Fornino, bread better at Grimaldi’s. Fornino has more room for seating, doesn’t have lines around the block and takes credit cards, which are some points in their favor. So overall, a slight edge to Fornino. However, Grimaldi’s is within walking distance from the house. Both recommended.

  • Belated YC B-day

    Belated B-day to YC, whose birthday was on Saturday. Survive the trip! Thanks for all of what you do for Triscribe, and hope that you had plenty of good eats.

  • When the heat breaks

    That smell — the earthy, muddy, pungent smell. 5 minutes later, a torrental downpour rages, breaking the scorching heat, steaming, sizzling on the sidewalk then turning into rivers clearing the gutters and the sky. An hour later, it stops, dropping the temperature 20 degrees. What a relief!

    Today, shopping for the picnic tomorrow. Lots and lots of stuff!

  • Fantasia

    Blog postings have been a little sparse, mostly because my laptop is on the fritz. There’s something up with the trackpad – I have to keep my hand near the pad or the computer freezes until I put it back.

    Finished the book “What Would the Founders Do?”, which offers insights into what would the founders of the United States really do if faced with the issues of today. Does Scalia’s vision of “original intent” jive with what the written record reveals? Turns out that they had actually thought about things like weapons of mass destruction (items contaminated with measles), terrorism (Barbary States pirates), intelligent design (Franklin was against) and term limits (George Washington). Some critics on Amazon complain that the book could have been more detailed, but it would miss the mission of being a more lighter, general-reading book. Not bad.

    Cool Food TV shows: Road Tasted (Paula Dean’s sons drive around the country – New York Italian episode was pretty good). Bobby Flay Throwdown got the chili champ to give up some secrets – light brown sugar. Alton Brown Feasting on Asphalt – lots of eating stuff that is really bad for you. The trick with the pull-down map going up like a windowshade revealing the site in question is slick.

    Check out the delicious bar on the right – I’ll be adding links in the fly as a “micro blog” of what I am doing. News becoming discouraging – what part of “Thou shall not kill” did these people Going to keep it inside for heatwave #2. My home AC is just not cutting it during this 100 degree weather.

  • Teabag

    Went to the Teabag NYC Film Show yesterday with P to support one of my friends. He was showing the intro to a movie that they want to produce, “Pretty to Think So”, and promoting the DVD to their documentary on the Korean/Chinese party scene in New York, “Party“. Good stuff.

    Afterwards, went to Jaya, a Malaysian restaurant. We had Roti Chanai, Ipoh Hor Fun, Yee Noodle in casserole with Black Mushroom, and a Chendor bing ice. Ok, not anywhere as good as Ipoh, but pretty good for New York, and we didn’t even break $20, so you can’t complain.

  • Taking the New York out of NYT?

    I think that the whole point of the New York Times is to give a New York view of the world, and a world view of New York. Otherwise, it might as well be USA Today with the Life magazine insert.

    In this week’s New York Times Magazine, there is an article celebrating Gazpacho, when the late NYT food critic Craig Clairborne first popularized the Spanish cold soup in 1968. Gazpacho has to be one of my favorite delights, especially for a light late summer meal.

    They then proceed to update it for the 21st century by providing a deconstructed version. Who do they go to for the task? Michael Tusk, who has an Italian fusion restaurant in San Francisco. I’m sure the guy is a fine chef, but you mean to tell me they couldn’t find anyone in New York that could do a deconstructed gazpacho? It wasn’t even like Tusk wanted to do it:

    Earlier this summer, I gave the Málaga gazpacho recipe to Michael Tusk, the chef and an owner of Quince Restaurant in San Francisco, to see what it would inspire in him. Deceit, at first: Tusk said he had to sneak around the San Francisco farmer’s market in a hooded sweatshirt with a bag of local hot-house tomatoes, hoping that none of his watchdog chef friends would catch him with the contraband.

    An Italian chef having a bag of tomatoes is going to pique the curiosity of other chefs? Come on. And they don’t read the NYT food columns, either. Right.

  • Gramercy Tavern

    The heat broke today for restaurant week, and P and I tried out Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio’s restaurant Gramercy Tavern. We were in the Main Room, where you have the choice of a regular, veggie, or premium prix fixe. On the regular prix fixe, which is not part of restaurant week, you have the choice of a dozen appertizers, and a choice of 6 fish dishes and 6 meat dishes. P had sea scallops and the lamb dish, while I had fried oysters in a fava soup and the sirloin with marrow and spätzle. We had fresh lemonade and limeade, accompanied with a small pitcher of simple syrup for sweetener. There were two free micro appertizers, a bean dip on crouton, and a cube of watermelon with micro feta cubes and aged balsamic vinegar. Afterwards, we had a free micro dose of berry sorbet on a custard, that was included. We ordered for dessert was a blueberry panecotta with a dose of lavender honey ice cream with chinese-style micro egg cakes, while P had a dark chocolate confection. The other novelty was the chance to try real English mead – which had a wheat ale flavor with high notes of honey. Everything seemed not so big, but the waves of dishes caught up with us. It was a very remarkable meal with immpeccable service.