Yolks on You

When I was in college, I went with my family to Japan, to show them where I had lived in high school as an exchange student, and to act as a translator while we toured the rest of the country.

In Kyoto, we went to a ryokan, a traditional inn that served dinner prepared in a regional style. Apparently, centuries ago, the Emperor had been hunting near Kyoto, and had become incredibly hungry on his way back to the palace. So he had stopped at a local farm, where the farmer cooked the hunted game on a garden hoe atop an open flame. The Emperor loved the meal so much that it became a regular preparation. Today, at some Kyoto ryokan, you can still eat dinner prepared on a large cast-iron plate atop a rolling fire.

My brother and parents and I headed in to such a dinner, where two Japanese women in robes set to work preparing the food, starting by throwing a few large pieces of chicken fat onto the cast-iron plate, as grease in which to cook. As I’ve written before, my mother has very strong ideas about food safety, and I could see her visibly cringe as those chunks of potential death by salmonella coasted around the plate. The women started cooking the first few items – vegetables, pieces of steak. Then, just before they served those items, they tossed on a few additional pieces of chicken fat. This, it turned out, was too much for my mother; raw chicken bumping against the cooked pieces tripped over her already pushed disgust limit. With little fanfare, my mother told us that she couldn’t possibly eat the food, got up, and left the restaurant.

The Japanese women looked stricken by my mother’s sudden disappearance, clearly considering mutual suicide as the only way to recover the honor of the meal. So, in my best Japanese, I tried to explain that the food looked extremely delicious, and that my mother had most certainly wanted to try it, but that she was feeling very jet-lagged after our long trip from the US. Doubting as the women seemed of my story, it apparently provided just enough cover to allow things to proceed. And proceed they did, with course after course after course served up for my brother, my father and me.

Had we each just been eating a single person’s serving, the meal would have been extremely substantial. But with us splitting my mother’s portion, too, it verged on ridiculous. We ate and ate, trying our best to show appreciation for the food. But, after a while, my father and brother bowed out. They couldn’t keep eating, they told me. There was just no way. So, in turn, I explained to the women that the meal was one of the most wonderful we had ever eaten, was the highlight of our trip to Japan, but that we couldn’t possibly finish.

You don’t want any more?, they asked.

No, I explained. It was truly delicious, but we had eaten as much as we could.

To which they replied: in that case, there’s nothing left but the omelette.

As we looked on in horror, they pulled a dozen eggs from the bottom of the cart, cracked them over the last of the food, and begun to cook the whole thing up in a sort of culinary coup de grâce.

I eat a lot of food; enough so that my family calls me the garbage disposal, and will pass the remains of their plates my way at restaurants. But, even so, I can honestly say: I am sure I’ve never been anywhere near that full in my entire life.

Hash

Here’s one thing I just don’t understand: why do New York City diners serve soggy breakfast potatoes, rather than crispy hash browns the way they do in the rest of the country? It’s a total travesty.

Fortunately, I’m now down the block from Landmarc, which appears to be one of about three places in all of NYC that serves real hash browns.

Even better, breakfast there overlaps with the night staff from CNN upstairs stopping in for post-work drinks. If you’re slightly hung over at 8am, it’s somehow oddly soothing to see a group of people still getting actively drunk.

Kingmaker

When I was a little kid, my parents would occasionally take me to the Boston Whaler, a New England seafood restaurant located on the San Francisco Bay Area’s southern peninsula.   I suspect they were there because, East Coasters at heart, they were craving lobster. But, on the west coast of the 1980’s, with imported lobster far overpriced and even farther under quality, Alaskan King Crab legs was the closest they could get.

I’ve always been a big eater, despite my relatively small (5’6″, 145#) size; enough so that my family has long referred to me as the ‘garbage disposal’, willing to eat the leftovers off any of their plates. But I hadn’t yet garnered that reputation when, at the Boston Whaler, me all of two years old, my parents ordered a full additional adult serving of King Crab legs, and the entire waitstaff of the restaurant gathered round to watch this tiny tot siglehandedly polish off the whole thing. 

Back then, I certainly wouldn’t have paired those legs with shrimp, oysters and a stiff martini. But, in today’s world, there’s no better way to fix an afternoon that’s otherwise off to a terrible start.  

Yolked

When I was a kid, my mother was obsessed with food safety. Handle raw chicken, and you were in need of full-body disinfecting. Cook burgers, and you’d best crisp them to a germ-free, well-done briquet. And when sushi first hit the San Francisco scene? Forget about it. I mean, raw fish!

From that childhood, I’d been inculcated with a fear of runny egg yolks, presumably a salmonella-laden path to near-instant death. At the same time, I also hated the texture of hard-boiled egg yolks. So, between the two, I was sure I hated runny eggs.

A few years ago, however, I fell in love with the spaghetti carbonara at Otto. And in trying to replicate the dish at home, I discovered that the secret to their version is egg yolks; lots and lots of egg yolks. (Like five yolks and one whole egg.)

Which, in turn, made me think that perhaps I didn’t dislike runny yolks after all. And, in fact, it turns out I don’t. At age 34, I tried eggs Benadict for the first time, and suddenly understood why the dish is so perennially popular. At Landmarc, one of my go-to breakfast meeting spots, I’ve switched to ordering my eggs poached, which smush together particularly well with their diner-style hash browns. (Side note: why does NYC serve breakfast potatoes everywhere instead of real hash browns? Terrible.)

I know I’ve previously observed that simply doing things the way you always do things isn’t a particularly good life strategy, that it makes sense to question our assumptions and look for better ways. But, as with most pieces of life wisdom, it’s easier said than lived.

So perhaps it’s a good reminder of that to discover that I’ve cheated myself out of decades of enjoying a now favorite food. As they say, looks like the yolks on me.

Go Fish

It’s been about a month since Jess and I moved to the Upper West Side, a stark change from our prior life on the outskirts of Times Square.

The biggest change, really, is the people. We traded tourists from Ohio and Geneva for a lot of old Jews. Fortunately, Jess’ favorite foods line up pretty squarely with old Jews’, so, from a culinary perspective, it’s been a big step up.

Within a block of the new apartment, for example, are both [Barney Greengrass](http://www.barneygreengrass.com/welcome.php) and [Murray’s Sturgeon](http://www.murrayssturgeon.com/), two of New York’s more storied appetizing stores. Appetizing, Wikipedia explains, “is best understood as a store that sells ‘the foods one eats with bagels.'” Lox, whitefish, smoked herring. It’s even better understood, I think, with a quick gloss of kashrut, the laws that govern kosher eating: those laws prohibit eating milk and meat together; they also, in turn, prohibit preparing and selling both milk and meat in the same restaurant. So if deli’s are busy selling meat (think Katz’s, Carnegies, or 2nd Avenue, serving up pastrami on rye and Reuben sandwiches), appetizing stores are the flip side of the coin, selling dairy – cream cheese, pickled herring in cream sauce, whitefish salad.

And it is, as Wikipedia point out, all excellent with bagels. Sort of Jewish soul food for Sunday mornings. Time to eat.

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Drag me to Hell(‘s Kitchen): Applebee’s

I have a business lunch planned; I’m coming from Chelsea, my lunchmate from East Midtown, so he kindly suggests West Midtown as an easy spot for us both.

“Do you have any ideas for a restaurant?” he asks.

“How about Applebee’s?” I say.

“Applebee’s?”

Silence.

Applebee’s it is.

++

“Where are you visiting us from?” asks the waitress.

“Two blocks that way,” I say.

“Two blocks that way?” she asks, confused.

“I live in that building,” I say, gesturing out the restaurant window.

“So why are you eating here?” she blurts, then covers her mouth.

++

I haven’t been to an Applebee’s in a while, I tell her. Can she recommend something?

The fiesta chicken.

“I’ll bring extra salsa.” She says “And some tabasco sauce.”

The chicken itself is fine enough – soft from chemical brining, the sauce salty and thick. The salsa tastes like it’s from a jar, but my waitress is right: it’s bright enough to make the meal work, at least with a good shot or two of tabasco.

It’s not so bad, this Applebee’s, I think.

++

Back at my desk, I reconsider, as all afternoon the chicken fiestas in my stomach.

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Sushi 2010

Six years back, I wrote a run-down of NYC sushi that inexplicably made the rounds of New York blogs, food blogs, etc., and for years floated atop Google’s results for ‘new york sushi’ and ‘sushi nyc’.

By now, that post is far out of date, but more than a handful of friends and colleagues still ask where to find excellent sushi.

So, to help them and you out, allow me to share the complete list:

1. Sushi Yasuda

That’s it. Seriously. I admit to a bit of paternal pride, having pronounced Sushi Yasuda as the future king of New York a few weeks after it first opened eight years ago. But, really, by now, everything else is varying degrees of crap.

I’m not sure what accounts for the decline, exactly. Perhaps fewer diners in a poor economy yields less fish turnover, and therefore older fish. Perhaps restaurants are just scrimping on quality to save. Or, perhaps, as my father (whose foundation focuses on island healthcare) contends, the problem is at the supply, rather than demand, end of the chain: small island countries have been hit particularly hard by the economic downtown, leading to fewer people working fishing boats, less frequent flights to ship fish back to the mainland, etc.

Whatever the reason, despite the reputation, despite the price point, by now, most of the city’s high-end sushi just isn’t that good. Sushi Yasuda’s is.

And, of course, there’s the great story behind the place:

Chef Yasuda was a young hot-shot chef in Japan in the ’80’s, inventing a style of eel preparation that spread nationally in the same way as Nobu’s miso black cod has here in the US. (As an aside, there is no such thing as black cod – it’s really just sable. Nobu took a cheap and widely available cut of fish, covered it with an equally cheap glaze, then re-branded it to sound exotic, and has been rolling in the dollars ever since).

Anyway, Yasuda comes to New York, and takes a job at Hatsuhana, the priciest, most venerable sushi stop at that time. Quickly, he rises up to star status.

And then, one day, like many days before, somebody comes in and orders a spicy tuna roll.

This time, however, Yasuda refuses. He can’t take it. Never again, he says, will he serve spicy mayo sauce.

He and the owners fight it out. The Hatsuhana side contends that, while spicy mayo is indeed a completely inauthentic way to destroy excellent fish, we Americans are too stupid, too unsophisticated to appreciate the real deal.

Yasuda, instead, argues that we’ve simply never been given the chance.

Hence Sushi Yasuda. Exceedingly good, exceedingly traditional sushi.

Try it out. Or better yet, don’t. Because, honestly, after you do, you’re going to have a hell of a time appreciating the sushi that’s served these days anywhere else.

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College Slice

We Yalies had no idea how good we had it.

Two of the pizza spots in New Haven, Sally’s and Pepe’s, clocked in at numbers 6 and 12, respectively, on the Today Show’s (by way of GQ’s) top 25 best pizzas around the country.

Tip of the hat to long-time friend and former Sharkbyte colleague Dave Fischer, who not only passed along the article, but also pointed out the disturbingly dead on Sally’s review:

6. Sally’s Apizza in New Haven, Conn.: White pie with potato
Sally’s is ancient, in an old Appalachian way. I can’t believe the men’s bathroom has been cleaned since 1938, when the pizzeria opened for business. Service was equally dismal. I noticed regulars getting some attention, not so much that they appeared pampered, but the rest of us waited about ninety minutes before our first pies appeared. To me, Sally’s should be renamed Sartre’s Apizza, home of absurdity and despair. I wasn’t there on any particular holiday, April Fools’ Day or Halloween, but the somnambulant staff wore weird outfits — nutsy party hats, outdated ties, Bermuda shorts, and T-shirts (in winter). I wondered if Sally’s was the headquarters of a work-release program for the culinarily insane. The customers weren’t impressive, either, especially the lady in the booth across from mine, fast asleep. Out of this agonizing ambience appeared a pie of incredible finesse, a tour de force, a white (no tomato sauce) pizza prepared with thinly sliced potatoes cooked to an artful golden brown, a scattering of equally faultless onions, and a masterful touch of rosemary, all perfectly complemented by Sally’s crust, a bit denser, chewier, and thinner than the one up the block at the equally fabled Pepe’s. By the way, I bet Sinatra got great service when he ate here.

I’m a bigger fan of Pepe’s, personally, though the ambiance is, fortunately and unfortunately, pretty much exactly the same.

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Amazing News

My brother informed me moments ago that there’s apparently a [Chick-Fil-A in New York City, mere blocks from my office](http://www.yelp.com/biz/chick-fil-a-new-york).

My lunch life will never be the same again.

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Eat Here: East Village

Momofuku Noodle Bar (171 1st Ave @ 11th): Order the pork buns, the Momofuku ramen, and a Hitachino White Ale. It’s so good, you won’t even mind that you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a reservation at Ko, David Chang’s newer, hipper restaurant (an Asian knock-off of Per Se) just down the block.

Perbacco (234 E 4th St @ B): Cash only, so stop at an ATM first. Then skip the forgettable entrees, and instead order as many of the Sardinian, tapas-style appetizers (and glasses of the excellently paired Italian wines) as you can afford. You’ll literally crave more for days after.

Itzocan (438 E 9th St @ A): Cash only here, too, plus a wait to get in and sweltering heat once you do, given the closet-sized space and the adjacent, hard-firing oven. Suck it up. It’s worth it.

Kanoyama (175 2nd Ave @ 11th): You knew there had to be a sushi place on the list, and this one’s extraordinarily good. If you’re feeling adventurous, ready for top-quality slices of fishes you’ve never even heard of, order omakase (‘at the chef’s discretion’) and enjoy the best sushi bang for the buck in all of NYC.

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