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Harvardwood NYC End of Summer Party at Sugar

Tonight, I went to a Harvardwood cocktail mixer at a bar/lounge/restaurant just south of SoHo called Sugar. Harvardwood is an alumni association for Harvard graduates working in and interested in the media and entertainment industries. It was nice to meet some new people and to learn a little bit more about the realities of breaking into media and entertainment. I also ran into an old friend, Darya, at the cocktail mixer. We were in the same transfer student orientation at Harvard.

Tomorrow morning, I am off to Montreal for a few days. Back to NYC on Monday night.

Links:

http://www.harvardwood.org

http://sugarnyc.com

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Fatty Crab

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I went to a Malaysian restaurant called Fatty Crab with Michelle, an old family friend from California tonight.  The restaurant is located in a New York neighborhood called the Meatpacking District, which I guess was once really where they slaughtered and packaged meat, but it is now full of upscale restaurants and shops full of hipsters.

The restaurant was very small and cozy with exposed brick walls and vintage furnishings and featured some very interesting, spicy, fishy dishes.  I have only had Malaysian food about 2 or 3 times before, so I am still expanding my horizons.  We ordered the signature dish, the Chili Crab (dungeoness crab, chili sauce, white toast $28) as well as the Skate Panggang (grilled on a banana leaf, sambal udang kering $12) and the Lo Si Fun (short rice noodles, Chinese sausage, shiitake $11).

The Chili Crab was super messy but super fun as well.  The crab came in the shell in a bowl full of a sweet and spicy red sauce that came with a few slices of toasted white bread.  It was quite an effort to get at the meager amounts of meat inside the crab shell, but well worth the mess and the inconvenience.  The skate was cooked perfectly tender and spicy yet fragrant with kaffir lime leaves and creamy with coconut milk.  The Lo Si Fun noodles demonstrate the strong Chinese influence in Malaysian cuisine.  The noodles themselves resembled Japanese udon noodle, fat with a bit of al dente texture.  The sauce was a dark, sexy, salty, fishy concoction with a nice textural and flavor contrast of shiitake mushroom and Chinese pork sausage pieces floating around.  We washed it all down with some cold beers.  I stuck with my old favorite from Thailand, a Singha.

I’m sure the kind of food served at Fatty Crab would cost a fraction of the price at a street market in Malaysia, but the flavors were very inspiring and the cozy ambience definitely make the place worth checking out.  I’m going to have to add some Malaysian dishes to my own personal cooking repertoire now!

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Hakata Kinryu Ramen 博多金龍ラーメン

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Last night, I had dinner with the girls (Tash, Natalie, Isa) at Hakata Kinryu Ramen, a ramen restaurant across the street from my house. In local foreigners lingo, we often refer to this place as the “Green Dragon” becauce of the cute mascot on the sign and on the menus, but curiously, the Japanese name of the restaurant actually means “Golden Dragon”.

Japanese-style ramen should not be confused with the instant noodles that we often refer to as “ramen” in the West. Japanese ramen is legitimate restaurant food made with fresh ingredients. There are a variety of different region variations of noodles, soups and toppings across Japan. Kyushu, and in particular, the Hakata area, is famous for tonkotsu (豚骨) broth, which is made out of pork parts and bones which have been boiled down for hours. Basically, it is liquid lard, but it tastes really good!

I ordered my usual favorite and a house special, the black sesame and black vinegar ramen (黒胡麻黒酢ラーメン) with a side of 3 deka-gyoza (でか餃子) a.k.a. giant pan-fried pork dumplings, a unique Kinryu spin on the traditional, regular-sized gyoza. The black sesame/black vinegar soup is a lighter than the tonkotsu pork broth, which is a good thing during the humid Japanese summer. The ground up black sesame adds a richness and complexity in flavor to the soup, while the black vinegar adds a little bit of a zing and lightness to the whole production.

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Pushkar

Luke and I went to one of my favorite restaurants in Nakatsu, Pushkar, an Indian restaurant in an old, converted traditional house, for lunch today. Pushkar has a real Indian chef and a real tandoor oven as well. They serve up a good mix of Northern Indian and Anglo-Indian classics (in other words, the kind of Indian food we associate with most Indian restaurants in the West). We both had the tandoori and curry lunch set, which came with a minced chicken curry, tamarind seafood curry, mixed salad, a piece of tandoori chicken, a piece of Sikh kebab, and nan bread.

While their lunch menu consists of several sets that are a permutations of different daily curries with salad, nan bread or rice. For dinner, they offer a full à la carte menu of Indian favorites. Some of my favorites are the chicken butter cream (similar to a chicken tikka masala), chicken dopiaza (another kind of chicken curry with onions, bell peppers and almonds), and the tandoor lamb chops. They also make a spinach and cheese-filled nan bread that is worth checking out as well.

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By the way, Luke has just started his own blog about Japan as well. Check it out here.

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Cuisine Food Japan Restaurant

一合 御馳走屋 Ichi-Gou Gochisouya

Tash and I went to a restaurant in Nakatsu called Ichi-gou Gochisouya (一合御馳走屋) for the first time tonight. It’s in an old Japanese-style building close to downtown that used to hold an udon/soba noodle shop popular with local expats. Now, it’s an Izakaya, a kind of Japanese style tapas/gastro-pub sort of restaurant. “Ichi-gou” means “one gou” in Japanese. A “gou” is a unit of measure in Japanese that is a bit less than a cup, that is used for rice and sake. “Gochisouya” means feast or banquet place/restaurant.

We walked into this gorgeous Japanese space with an open kitchen. It seemed like there were more staff members working there than customers, so service, like always in Japan, was very prompt and attentive. We were also brought a small blackboard with the specials and recommendations of the week that supplemented the vast menu already on the table.

Apparently, our presence in the restaurant was funny or something.  Some of the chefs were giggling when we walked in and when we left.  Also, when I ordered a second round of food and drinks, the waitress asked us if we could read the menu.  hmm, um, I’ve already ordered once and I read the Japanese menu fine.  Why ask now?  Maybe it has to do with the fact that Natasha is a stereotypical blonde gaijin. One of the girls at the neighboring table made it a point to say “Hello! Hello! Hello!” in English to her girlfriends as she walked past us when she walked in late to join them. So who exactly was she saying hello to?  Not us, because it’s not like they she was trying to strike up a conversation with us or anything.  Maybe just showing off her English to her friends?  Who knows, but with 6 years of mandatory English at schools here, I would certainly hope that every Japanese person with a high school diploma can say at least “hello”.  Alas, gaijin still equals funny in rural Japan.

All this aside, let’s talk about food.  We ordered:

Ryuukyuu-tsuke (琉球漬):  Marinated sashimi pieces with slivers of daikon radish

Asatsuki to Toufu no Hanryuu Sarada (浅葱と豆腐の韓流サラダ): chive, red onion and tofu salad with a spicy Korean-style dressing

Watarigani no Koura-yaki (ワタリガニの甲羅焼): crab and squid meat topped with a Béchamel sauce and broiled gratin-style in the crab shell

Ebi no Tempura (エビの天婦羅):  classic tempura-style fried shrimp
And washed it all down with a couple of nama-biiru (draught beers).

mmm.  An excellent new discovery and a great way to celebrate the start of the weekend!