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Aug 6

Sidecar

Sidecar and Sunshine, dinner and a movie choices I made Saturday night, both left me with the same message: stick with your original mission. Sunshine I’ll leave nebulous and unspoiled. Sidecar, I’ll explain a bit.

Newly opened restaurants should be approached with caution and patience. But curiosity got the better of me with this South Slope oddity near the Blockbuster and Rent a Center (only the classiest neighborhoods have leather sectionals and plasma TVs on installment plans).

They didn’t have their liquor license yet, which was a minor disappointment because their list of cocktails sounded promising. But I wasn’t too crushed because a BYOB six-pack is a money-saver. We made our first mistake by turning down a weirdo small table in the window that practically had you sitting with the party next to you. We thought we’d wait at the (alcohol-free) bar until something opened up.

The space is high-ceilinged and handsome with de rigeur mid-‘00s hanging filament bulbs. More seating is allotted to drinking than dining which would be fine if there were drinks. And there were people who seemed to be just drinking, which was kind of baffling. Who would hang out a bar not serving drinks, drinking? I guess it’s better than imbibing in your own living room.

We skimmed the menus that were given to us, cracked open a couple Stellas obtained on the corner and figured we’d wait it out. The couple sitting next to us at the bar, who I swear walked in after us, approached the hostess and next thing I knew they were seated. Not cool.

There’s nothing as annoying as being in line at a grocery or drug store when a cashier yells “next” only to have a newcomer walk right up with no one in charge acknowledging who was actually next. I like a tight ship.

As long as we were waiting, we weren’t going to go hungry so we ordered crostini topped with a sweetish pate, served with a mixed salad and a few beet cubes. This is where the stay-the-course plan began falling apart. Our mission was to eat dinner sitting at a table and apparently, we had strayed the second we ordered food from the bar. The place started clearing out and every single person who’d come in after us was now sitting at booths.

Clearly, we’d been brushed off. I realize once you order food at the bar it’s kind of like your request for a table has been cancelled out (though the original couple next to us who were immediately seated had also ordered food at the bar first) but we still had entrees coming and no one else at the bar was eating full meals. At this point there were two empty tables, so we asked once again to be seated (I was either going to walk out or seat myself). You would’ve thought we were Al-Qaeda with the amount of reluctance received. We were given the eye for the remainder or our meal.

So, after about 45 minutes we got a booth and our entrees that I saw sitting on the metal shelf for at least ten minutes. They were looked at and touched numerous times, though no one seemed to have any idea where they were intended to go. It’s not that big of a restaurant for such confusion.

My creative grilled cibatta banh mi (called a banh de, which I am guessing is a play on DeCoursy, the surname of the brother-owners) with a shooter of cucumber juice was likeable. And James didn’t have complaints about his fried chicken, mashed root vegetables and succotash. But the food was all secondary at this point.

I hate service to overshadow a meal and I’m trying to temper knee-jerk harshness but there were glitches I couldn’t get past. It wasn’t Williamsburg-bad, there was a semblance of professionalism but I didn’t care for the way things played out. I wanted to like the place and the components were all there: tasty reasonably priced food, eclectic juke box (The Vaselines and Exploding Hearts were both pleasing) and potentially fun cocktails. Yet nothing gelled.

Sunshine, too, started off with promise before evolving into a horror flick. Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into before it’s too late.

Sidecar * 560 Fifth Ave., Brooklyn, NY

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Aug 5

There Must be Sadder Pastimes Than Grocery Shopping, Right?

I’ve never been able to wrap my head around farmers market fanaticism (though I did pay a brief visit to Grand Army Plaza’s on Saturday and picked up some tomatoes and opal basil). I get my entertainment from wide-aisled, fluorescent-lit mega markets. The Western Beef H.Q. will always be my favorite mainstream grocery store but Stop & Shop wows in other ways.

We really only go when we need to return bottles (though it’s often fruitless since I figured out they don’t take brands they don’t sell, so all our Trader Joe’s and various microbrew brands were rejected). I made a whopping 95 cents from plastic Vintage Seltzer. If anyone knows of any self-serve bottle returns in South Brooklyn, please do tell.

The two bright spots are the baked goods and metal shelves teeming with discontinued items. They used to hide the marked down rejects in the back near the bathrooms but it has been moved so it’s the first thing you see upon entering. You don’t often see price-slashed cast offs in NYC, probably because there isn’t enough room.

I picked up a can of oil-packed Genova Tonno (which I just discovered is owned by Chicken of the Sea) which isn’t half-bad tossed with white beans, red onions and arugula. But it was the Trivial Pursuit Pop Tarts that took top prize from the shelf of misfit food. I genuinely like Pop Tarts so I’m still debating whether I should eat them or save them along with my other just-for-looks snacks like Strawberry Fluff and KC Masterpiece ranch-flavored bbq sauce that I hoard on an Ikea Ivar shelf downstairs.

Ready to eat cheesecake filling was new to me. I thought those no-bake Jello “cheesecake” mixes were instant enough. There’s something about this plastic tub that implies the filling will never make its way into a crust and more likely alternate between spoon and mouth.

I couldn’t believe Stop & Shop didn’t have Lofthouse cookies, that’s their one reliable item. But single serve carrot cake and 7UP crème cake (we bought both) made up for the lack of soft cookes.
Do they still have Little Buckets at KFC? Ok, yes they do (I love answering my own question). S&S makes Boston cream, strawberry shortcake and said carrot cake in short stubby plastic containers that remind me of a fast food dessert.

A cheap jumble of raisin and nut studded cake, whipped cream and piped cream cheese frosting. For only $1.99, I got three snack occasions out of this.

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Aug 3

Chelada Style

Chill I wondered how long it would take for micheladas to go mainstream. I wrote about them some time ago and I still wouldn’t say they’re wildly popular, especially not outside of Mexican restaurants.

I first saw Miller Chill a few weeks ago at a New Jersey Chevy’s. Of all the places I might’ve spotted the bottled beverage, a suburban Chevy’s makes the most sense. This beer cocktail is simply a chelada with salt and lime, no chile. I always thought the spice was the fun of a michelada.

I haven’t seen the Budweiser Chelada in person but I am aware of its creepy existence. Creepy because it contains Clamato. And I thought that addition was weird enough in chips.

What mildly unknown regional drink will get popularized in the U.S. next? Kvass? Chile beer sounds fine but the thought of rye bread beer makes me want to hurl. Cauim? I would like to see how Anheuser-Busch would handle the chewed manioc aspect. I’m sure it could be commercialized with synthetic enzymes. My vote is for lamanog and it looks like it’s actually being served at Cendrillon.

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Aug 3

Sunday Night Special: Quick-Fried Lamb & Pounded Eggplants with Green Peppers

Ok, I didn’t make this dinner until Tuesday and it’s now Thursday, but it was intended for Sunday night. And isn’t Sunday night really just a state of mind anyway? This weekend I got waylaid by a late lunch/early dinner at Sripraphai and it seemed silly to cook Chinese food just a few hours later.

The goal was to use at least part of a boneless lamb roast that we bought on a whim from Costco. Having no desire for a traditional British preparation (it’s hard not to think of the U.K. or Australia), Indian food seemed logical. Then I thought of Northern Chinese dishes using chiles, cumin and cilantro. That was definitely it.

There was only one such recipe in The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, quick fried lamb but it didn’t contain cumin. Beef with cumin, did, however. Because I’m a rule follower, I essentially used the lamb recipe and just added the earthy spice in the middle. I didn’t have angelica root and I’m not sure how it tastes exactly. Well, I’m not totally a rule follower because I persist in reprinting copyrighted recipes. I swear, I’ll stop soon.

Because I never learn from past mistakes, I kind of mangled this dish by overcrowding the wok. I’d envisioned these perfectly seared, spicy, oil-coated slices of meat and I ended up with boiled mutton. Well, practically. Too much meat produced too much liquid and my version became soupy and a little tough. Next time I’ll be more careful and make it spicier.

Quick-Fried Lamb
Xiao Chao Yang Rou

Ingredients
10 ounces lean boneless lamb
1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine
1 teaspoon light soy sauce
½ teaspoon dark soy sauce
¼ teaspoon salt, plus extra to taste
2 teaspoons cumin
2 fresh red chiles or ½ red pepper
2 ½ ounces cilantro or Chinese celery
2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh ginger
2 teaspoons finely chopped garlic
2 teaspoons dried chile flakes (optional)
1 tablespoon finely chopped Chinese angelica root (optional)
1 teaspoon sesame oil
3 tablespoons peanut oil for cooking

1. Cut the lamb across the grain into thin slices. Place the slices in a bowl, add the Shaoxing wine, soy sauces, and salt and mix well; set aside.

2. Cut the red chiles into thin slices; if using bell pepper, cut into small squares. Cut the cilantro stems or celery into 2-inch pieces, reserve some leaves for a garnish and set aside the other leaves for other uses.

3. Heat the wok over a high flame until smoke rises, then add the peanut oil and swirl around. Add the ginger, garlic, fresh chile or bell pepper, chile flakes, cumin and angelica root, if using, and stir-fry briefly until fragrant.

4. Add the lamb and continue stir-frying, adding salt to taste, if necessary. When the lamb is almost cooked, add the cilantro or celery, and stir a few times until barely cooked. Turn off the heat, stir in the sesame oil and serve, with cilantro leaf garnish, if desired.

I scoured the same cookbook for a quick vegetable dish that didn’t contain any hard to find ingredients. Sadly, that meant no Chinese chives, black beans, lotus root, purple perilla, fava beans, duck eggs or bamboo shoots. I landed on a recipe that used eggplant, green pepper and soy sauce, simple as that. Eggplant does tend to require an unseemly amount of oil to get silky. I skimped a bit, but either way the dish was nowhere near greasy and nothing like you’d get from take-out joint. I was tempted to substitute red peppers because green ones are low on my list of favorites, but the dry wok cooking managed to sweeten them up.

Pounded Eggplants with Green Peppers
Qing Jiao Lei Qie Zi

Ingredients
1 pound eggplants (preferably Chinese)
salt
5 ounces green bell peppers, thin-skinned if possible
light soy sauce
4 tablespoons peanut oil for cooking

1. Peel the eggplants and slice thickly. Sprinkle with salt, toss to coat evenly, and then set aside for 30 minutes

2. Meanwhile, cut the pepper in half, discard the seeds and stem and thinly slice; set aside.

3. When the eggplants are ready, rinse them to get rid of excess salt, and shake dry; set aside.

4. Stir-fry the peppers in a dry wok over a medium flame until soft and fragrant, pressing them against the sides of the wok; set aside.

5. Heat the oil in a wok over a medium flame. Add the eggplants and stir-fry for a good 10 minutes or so, until they are very tender but not colored. As they soften, mash them up with a wok scoop, until you have a sludgy paste that is about half the volume of the original eggplant slices.

6. Add the bell peppers and stir-fry until both ingredients are fragrant and well-mixed, seasoning with a little soy sauce to taste. Serve.

Recipes from “The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook” by Fuchsia Dunlop. W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

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Aug 2

Wakiya

Of course I know better than to get sucked into hype, but part of me (a tiny sliver buried deep inside) was curious what the Wakiya fuss was about. I hate scenes so I hemmed and hawed over bowing out of my reservation (I didn’t realize that obtaining one was such a big deal. I called, I got one. And 8:45 seemed like a perfectly sane dining time to me). Do I really want to pay good money to get treated like an untouchable?

But aging naïf that I am, I was genuinely interested in the cuisine. I realize food is hardly the point of a place like this (I’m currently planning a fall trip to Shanghai and don’t anticipate encountering much Wakiya-style fare) but what little I’ve read so far has focused more on service and style issues. I didn’t encounter much attitude and I actually expected the prices to be crazier (though yes, the portions are petite). We spent about $120 with four dishes and three drinks. No bargain, but hardly outrageous either.

I was a little bummed to see nary a C-lister. Just common folks to my uneducated gaze. Gawker saw Dennis Quaid a few nights ago (I saw him last night in Day After Tomorrow on cable. I didn’t want to—I was waiting for Damages to start). I was hoping for at least Randy Quaid or a lesser Arquette or Baldwin.

Soup dumplings. No complaints and the vinegar with ginger shreds was a fitting acidic touch. They instruct you to eat them from a small bowl but you really kind of need a big spoon with these messy blobs of dough.

Bang bang chicken. This is a cold dish of shredded chicken dressed with a sweet-hot sesame, soy and vinegar mixture. I could imagine some people thinking this was spicy, though it easily could’ve been amped up threefold.

Tso tsao pork. That’s sweet and sour pork to you. Supposedly the black vinegar makes it more refined. I think it was the tiny serving size that shouted upscale.

Soft shell crab with golden sand. To remain poetic yet maintain accuracy, I would’ve called it scarlet sand, as it the grit was orange-red, and frankly, tasted like crushed Lays BBQ chips. In other words, the sand was quite tasty. But the crumbs were panko, black beans and a few different dried chiles that I can’t recall. I think Aleppo was one variety.

XO omelet fried rice. We really didn’t really need this, though James thought it was the best dish. The egg-wrapped rice came at the end and was duly filling. I might’ve forgone it for a dessert.

Urine-drenched toilet seats were the least surprising thing of the evening. As I’ve discovered with various NYC jobs, the “classier” the caliber of ladyfolk, the filthier shared bathrooms will be. This was a unisex bathroom, but I only saw groups of girls jamming into the cramped space. I am supposed to be talking about food here, so I’ll spare you further gruesome anecdotes.

Wakiya * 2 Lexington Ave., New York, NY

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Aug 1

And You Thought Radish Roses Were Fancy

Radishes aren’t a loathe like melons or malta, but I could do without them in most circumstances. (Daikon is another story. A good story.) When they come with tacos I might take a nibble or two because I hate to waste. I kind of thought radishes were good for nothing until I heard about Noche de Rábanos a.k.a. Radish Night in Oaxaca. Not that I’ve witnessed it first hand, but it appears to be a freaktastic folk art blitz that takes place right before Christmas. I’ve always dug Chinese and Thai fruit and vegetable carving but these inedible sculptures are something else altogether.

Radish Night [Planeta]
La Noche de Rábanos [Aqui Oaxaca]
Radish Festival Photo Gallery [About.com]

Photo from Beverlita on Flickr

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