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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
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…)
The Vanderbilt
In its Prospect Heights neighborhood, the Vanderbilt is known as “the expensive place.” Mobbed at first and then dismissed for its small portions at higher-than-usual price tags, the Vanderbilt is quieter now. You can actually see the reclaimed wood in the industrial but rustic front room when it’s not jam packed with people, and when you order one of the excellent cocktails at the marble-topped bar, you can hear yourself speak. You can even walk in and get a table. And if you’re from Manhattan, land of the $15 glass of wine, $15 for thick, peppery slabs of hamachi crudo by Brooklyn’s Michelin-starred chef Saul Bolton will seem like a bargain.
The problem seems to be one of clarification: the Vanderbilt was probably never meant to be cheap. It brings Saul’s artisanal, global cuisine from the more formal restaurant on Smith Street to a wider audience via a small plates menu that touches down everywhere from Japan to Germany. Could you go down the street and get bigger portions for less? Yes. If your idea of fancy food involves Hollandaise sauce, then by all means keep walking. But if you want a kitchen that can do artisanal food very well, you’re in the right place. (more…)
Posted in food
Tagged American food, Asian food, Austrian food, bars, Brooklyn, New York, restaurants
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Lunch: Cafe Boulud
The rules for restaurants are different on the Upper East Side. Take ho hum Italian spot Via Quadronno on East 73rd, which charges $10 for tomatoes on toast, and no one so much as bats an eye—especially not that Real Housewife of New York in the corner. But there’s an upside to this kind of disposable income when it’s applied wisely: the presence of a captive wealthy audience also means that expensive but exquisite restaurants have a place to thrive and prosper.
Café Boulud, the Daniel Boulud restaurant on East 76th, closed for renovations and just reopened last month. It’s already packed at the prime ladies-who-lunch hour, 1pm on a recent weekday. (more…)
Lunch: Aamchi Pao
Lunch should be about more than stuffing something down your craw, even if you only have a limited time to do so. Since there are so many NYC restaurants worth sampling, we decided to take advantage of this neglected meal and hit up some new restaurants on our list—particularly the cheap eats, since cheap often equals fast.
Imagine a mash-up of Hampton Chutney and a taco truck, and you’ve got Aamchi Pao in Greenwich Village. (more…)
Sake Bar Hagi
There’s a traditional red paper lantern at the door, stairs leading down off a random Midtown street, and the words “sake bar” inscribed on the wooden door jamb. Otherwise, there’s nothing that would alert you to this cult favorite izakaya place in Times Square. But look two doors left of the Hawaiian Tropic Zone and you’ll find Sake Bar Hagi, a draw for New Yorkers and Japanese tourists alike. The menu outside may not look particularly tempting, unless calves liver sashimi or broiled dried skate fin is your thing, but add your name and cell phone number to the list downstairs and in a half hour to an hour you will be inside, well on your way to figuring out the appeal of this place. (more…)
The Copycat Chef: Asian Bloody Mary
This Asian spin on a Bloody Mary was inspired by Sake Bar Hagi, though it isn’t served there. As at Monkeytown in Williamsburg, an Asian Bloody Mary is the cuisine of a country that doesn’t actually exist.
On a recent night at Hagi with Joey Deckle, he asked for some shichimi pepper. This blend of chili pepper, orange peel, sesame seed and seaweed tasted like it had been made to go in a good spicy Bloody Mary. Marie Fromage suggested it should be dusted on the rim of the glass.
“I always thought they should put fish sauce in a Bloody Mary,” said Joey Deckle, which didn’t seem too far off, given the popularity of clamato juice in Bloody Marys.
So here’s a new recipe for the Asian Bloody Mary, the dangerous brain child of three food people drinking sake.
Posted in food
Tagged Asian food, Bloody Marys, cocktails, Sake Bar Hagi, the copycat chef
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This Weekend in Food: Bite of BoCoCa and Hapa Kitchen BBQ at Brooklyn Yard
Don’t just read about all the gourmet fare coming out of Brooklyn, taste it yourself this Saturday, with two – count ‘em, two – food fests that promise to deliver great food at even better prices.
Lunch: Bite of BoCoCa
More than 20 Court Street and Smith Street restaurants, gourmet stores, and bakeries are taking over the Transit Garden at Smith Street and 2nd Place this Saturday from 1pm-6pm for Bite of BoCoCa. Your $10 for five tastings or $20 for 12 tastings will benefit the South Brooklyn Local Development Corporation (SBLDC), which keeps up the pretty gardens in the nabe. (more…)
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