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a.k.a. Marcy Swingle - obsessed with food and fashion.View my photography website.
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Tag Archives: Asian food
Totto Ramen
In a city full of ramen restaurants, Totto Ramen has become an essential stop on the NYC ramen tour. Opened just a couple of years ago by by the owner of Yakitori Totto, this Tokyo-style lunch spot on far West 52nd draws a crowd into the narrow space, where the din of the open kitchen spills over into a room full of diners hunched over bowls of steaming noodles. It’s a little crowded, it’s a little chaotic, and that’s just as it should be.
Noodles are what gave ramen soups their name, but for me the key element is the broth. The milky pork broth of Ippudo’s tonkotsu ramen was a revelation when it landed in New York on Fourth Avenue. The broth, with its super umami taste and velvety mouth feel, remains one of the big draws at this perennially popular restaurant. (more…)
Lunch: Kuaile Hand Pulled Noodle Restaurant
Winter may have come early this year, but one reason to celebrate this is the earlier-than-expected enjoyment of noodle soups. Soul-sustaining ramen and hand pulled noodle soups, so neglected in the summer, are what gets us through the dark and dreary months.
In case you have any doubt about the specialty of the new Kuaile Hand Pulled Noodle Restaurant on Forsyth Street in Chinatown, the answer comes as soon as you walk in the door: Everywhere there’s the sound of slurping. The place is bare bones, with a few formica tables and not much in the way of decor, but there are already a good number of customers bent over Kuaile’s hand pulled noodle soup.
Le Petit Marché, Paris
The Marais neighborhood on Paris’ right bank may be known for its excellent shops, cool crowd and Galliano’s meltdown, but for great dining, most Parisians head elsewhere. Seemingly as soon as the area became trendy several years ago, the restaurants started catering to tourists looking for convenience over quality.
There are still some very good meals to be had here for a reasonable price, and since we were staying in the Marais this past trip to Paris, we decided to dine in depth in this one particular neighborhood. One key is to head away from main drag and look for places off the beaten path – as on the quiet rue Béarn just north of the Place des Vosges. Here a local crowd gathers at the outdoor tables of Le Petit Marché, a modern Parisian bistro with a pan-Asian spin to the classics.
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Tagged Asian food, French food, Le Marais, Paris, Paris restaurants, restaurants
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Best Outdoor Dining 2011
As much as we complain about the heat, it’s so nice to be able to dine al fresco when summer finally comes to New York. But what we’re looking for isn’t any old table plunked on a sidewalk next to a major truck route, but a nice setting, fun scene and preferably some good food. Here is an opinionated guide to the best outdoor dining in town. (more…)
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Tagged American food, Asian food, bars, BBQ, burgers, fireplaces, French food, German food, guides, Italian food, New York, outdoor dining, pizza, restaurants
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Asiadog
Corn dogs are best avoided if you can’t help wondering when the actual hot dog last saw the light of day before it was encrypted in a wall of starchy, mysteriously cylindrical corn breading. Last month? Or several millennia ago?
So it was with some trepidation that I ordered the kimchi pancake corndog ($6) at the new eight-seat restaurant and takeout joint Asiadog on Kenmare street. Theirs was no machine-made corn dog, however, but a reassuringly asymmetrical dog, pictured right, much like an actual kimchi pancake would look when recently wrapped around a beef hot dog and deep fried until golden brown. The results were astoundingly delicious, drizzled with a sweet and spicy homemade sauce a lot like the addictive sauce in a good bulgogi. (more…)
Lotus of Siam
There are several accursed restaurant spaces in New York City, and 24 Fifth Avenue is considered to be one of them. Upscale wine restaurant Cru closed after only a couple years in this oddly laid out, bilevel dining room, and before that, Washington Park floundered in this space, even though it marked the return of celebrity chef Jonathan Waxman to the NYC culinary scene.
Our fingers were crossed that the critically-acclaimed, Vegas-based Thai restaurant Lotus of Siam could reverse the ill tides of feng shui here. At least the lively crowd in the dining room, lured here by the good early reviews, brings good vibes to the setting. But the rooms are still awkward, and now they’re decorated with unidentifiable copper wire sculptures and wall hangings of artistically draped dried chili peppers. Dimming the lighting should have helped, but the universally low wattage has created not sexy mood but cafeteria gloom. Oh well – chances are you didn’t come here for the ambiance anyway, but for the authentic Thai food. (more…)
Kin Shop
Good food is a lot like good clothing in one regard: Surround yourself with enough cheap copies, and you’ll forget what the real thing is like. Such has been the case for Thai food in the Village over the past 10 years. While Korean and Japanese restaurants have gone up and up in quality and stature, authentic Thai places like Holy Basil went on the decline as numerous “Asian fusion” concept restaurants piled in, angling for customers (NYU students) by plying them with the lowest common denominator of the nation’s cuisine (sugar).
All it takes is one look at the menu outside the door to divine that Kin Shop, the new restaurant by Perilla chef Harold Dieterle, is not for students. Several of the shared entree dishes are in the $20+ range, and the green-tinged decor beyond the plate glass windows is sophisticated if casual. We went in hoping to rediscover the true draw of Thai cuisine: a complex mix of flavors and spice, spice, spice. (more…)
Xi’an Famous Foods
Ever get a yen for a cold, spicy salad made with…lamb face? Chances are you haven’t, but once you’ve had this and some of the other unusual offerings at the new Xi’an Famous Foods on St. Mark’s place, you may start to crave it.
A welcome addition to a street that’s already rife with Asian food places, Xi’an Famous Foods ups the ante by upping the spice content, a lot. One bite of cold buckwheat noodles ($5, item A3), above, and you may start to cry – for a good reason. The amount of fresh horseradish is intense, counterbalanced by cilantro, bean sprouts and sesame oil. As with the fat, hand-pulled noodles that go into many of the dishes here, the buckwheat noodles are made fresh every day. (more…)
Lunch: Ippudo
The most popular restaurant in my neighborhood is one I haven’t been able to visit until now. Every time I walked by Ippudo, it was mobbed, the plate glass window full of the forlornly hungry faces of gastro tourists and dedicated locals. Waits were usually an hour or more, which meant we usually walked away shaking our fists and saying, “It’s just soup, people! Get a grip!”
In cases like this, you usually try to console yourself by getting the same dish in a nearby alternate restaurant. But now that I’ve actually been able to eat at Ippudo, I can report that it can be revelatory – and not nearly the same as your average ramen place around the corner. (more…)
The Sushi Concierge
You may know not to douse your rice with soy sauce or order rolls made with cream cheese, but how much do you really know about sushi? Trevor Corson, author the bestselling book The Secret Life of Lobsters and The Story of Sushi, hosts weekly dinners at Jewel Bako in New York and Zentan in D.C., where he takes on the mantle of the Sushi Concierge, your personal guide to sushi etiquette and history.
Before you sharpen those chopsticks (a sushi bar no-no, by the way), settle down and have a sushi meal as it would have been eaten by a Japanese connoisseur 70 or 80 years ago. What’s not on the throwback menu may surprise you: no tuna, no hamachi, no yellowtail and no unagi, and the only salmon is Tanzanian king salmon from New Zealand. (more…)
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