very small pickles can be pretty sexy, too

Supposedly, Swiss fondue is one of the world’s sexiest foods.  In fact, fondue is so sexy that I could only find one friend who was willing to eat fondue with me… and he actually sort of hates cheese.  I even invited one of NYC’s most accomplished food bloggers, and he responded by saying simply, “cheese makes me gag.”  Hilarious.

So along with my cheese-hating non-Swiss friend, I went to the New York Swiss Society’s annual fondue dinner.  And then shit caught fire.  And that’s totally sexy.

The evening started auspiciously.  Several friendly members of the Swiss Society greeted us at the door.  We shared a table with an entertaining crew of international fondue-lovers, including a multilingual Greek retiree who once lived in Switzerland, a Hungarian dentist and his charismatic Syrian partner, and a Swiss hedge fund dude and his Minnesotan bride-to-be.  There was alcohol.  And cheesy Swiss-German music.  Life was good.

it's all fun and games until the first eyebrow gets singed... and after that, it's even more fun

Our meal included four courses, starting with a pre-appetizer snack of bundnerteller, consisting of tasty air-dried meat (vaguely resembling prosciutto) and sbrinz, a hard cheese made from raw cow’s milk.  We then received a larger appetizer platter, loaded with a cute mix of marinated vegetables, cornichons, cured meats, and potato salad.  It was all very classy and tasty.

For the third course, we were supposed to eat magnificent Swiss fondue.  In case you’ve had your head up your butt for your entire gastronomic life, fondue is a Swiss delicacy, consisting of craploads of melted cheese in a carefully calibrated brine of white wine, water, and kirsch (cherry brandy).  According to the wise Swiss gentleman sitting next to me, fondue is always warmed over a low flame, but if the fondue boils too intensely (by using an overly large, aggressive flame), it becomes dry, clumpy, and stinky.  And dry, clumpy, stinky fondue is not sexy.

Giant flaming sterno cans, however, are unbelievably sexy.  At our lovely Swiss banquet, each eight-person table received two giant flaming sterno cans, which meant that sixteen eyebrows were in serious peril at each table.  Once the fondue pots were placed over the flaming sterno cans, the cheese started boiling like mad.  Within a few minutes, screams of horror could be heard on one side of the room, as fondue began to spill onto the tables.

very polite; tastes like cheese

The banquet staff handled the situation with grace, quickly pulling the bubbling fondue and flaming sterno cans from the tables. Dudes were running around everywhere with flaming sterno cans and giant pots of cheese.  Fun!

Eventually, the restaurant staff found a stash of less-aggressive sterno cans, and we all returned to politely dipping pieces of bread in our politely bubbling fondue.  It tasted like cheese.  My cheese-hating friend daintily dabbed at the fondue a few times, and then started eating the bread by itself when nobody was looking.  Clearly, the sexiness of fondue was lost on both of us.

a few extra flames might have made these sexier... and if you ask our Swiss friend, some whipped cream would have made the meringue more convincingly Swiss

As the only fondue rookies at our table, my pal and I were perfectly happy with the event—after all, we got to eat huge quantities of non-Swiss desserts, accompanied by some vaguely Swiss chunks of meringue drizzled with chocolate.  And we got to drink Quollfrisch, a hoppy Swiss beer, while watching things catch fire.  What more could we want?

Our table-mates weren’t pleased, though.  The Greek retiree groused that the flames were dangerous, and then he complained that the Hungarian dentist was too fat.  The wise young Swiss gentleman insisted that the fondue was terrible (“go to Café Select instead”), and that the appetizers and desserts were thoroughly un-Swiss (“meringue should be served with whipped cream, never with chocolate”).  Even the Swiss gentleman’s charming Minnesotan bride-to-be was contrite: “I’m sorry, guys, Swiss dinners aren’t usually like this.”

Still, we had a perfectly entertaining evening.  And as a special bonus, we actually left with all of our eyebrows fully intact.

I guess he didn't agree that flaming sterno cans are sexy

Swiss Society of New York
Annual Fondue Dinner, held at Cucina Restaurant
200 Park Avenue, Manhattan
Subway: Grand Central (4, 5, 6, 7, S trains)

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lagman, in its vivid, horse-free glory

I went to Sheepshead Bay, looking for Armenian food.  Instead, I found tasty dried horse meat.  And fake pet birds.  Life is good.

Aladdin, a six-week-old Uzbek restaurant in the spot formerly occupied by Armenian-owned Garden Bay Café, serves all sorts of classic Uzbek awesomeness:  a colorful version of lagman (noodle) soup, solid renditions of manti (large dumplings, similar to nippled Georgian khinkhali) and chebureki (flat, empanada-like pockets of fried meat and dough), and the best plov (Uzbek rice pilaf with lamb) I’ve had in NYC.

zesty and non-gloppy... like tongue oughta be

Across the board, the execution at Aladdin seemed to be a notch above its pan-Soviet peers.  All of our kebabs had a delicious charred taste to them, the avocado salad was unusually fresh, and the servers were friendly and efficient.  Even the tongue salad, topped with freshly fried onion rings, had an appealing tang to it, and was a huge improvement on the gloppy stuff we ate in a nearby Belorussian restaurant. 

Clearly, they’re doing something right.  The place was packed on only its seventh weekend of business, and the Kyrgyz ambassador to the United States was in the restaurant, despite the fact that the restaurant is hardly Kyrgyz:  the chef is from Uzbekistan and his front-of-the-house partner, a fine fellow named Alex, is from the Caucasus mountains in southwestern Russia.

awesome, but not quite as awesome as horse meat

And clearly, one of the things they’re doing right is the décor:  there are fake birds, in a fake golden birdcage.  And that’s awesome.

Even more awesome:  one of our salads was an appealing little number called naryn, made from shredded dough with medallions of an unusually tasty meat product.  It tasted like a cross between a mild sausage and a not-completely-dried beef jerky, and none of us—not even our well-traveled Armenian friend—knew exactly what it was.  I imagined that it was beef or lamb, cured in some ingenious way.

Nope.  It was horse meat, dried with cumin.  And it was delicious.

delicious mystery meat is awesome, yes?

Aladdin Restaurant
1788 Sheepshead Bay Road, Brooklyn
Subway: Sheepshead Bay (B, Q trains)

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Here’s why I love New York:  I was walking down a street in Astoria, feeling potbellied after visiting a Chilean bakery and a Jordanian bakery, when I noticed a cute little place called Harissa Café.  I took a peek at the menu, thinking I’d found a Moroccan restaurant, and noticed that several of the dishes were listed as “North African,” not Moroccan.

not-quite-Moroccan boureks

That’s usually a hint that somebody is from an underappreciated country, and might be in the food closet.  That’s potentially very exciting, if you’re, say, trying to eat food from every underappreciated country in the world.

So I walked in, ordered a can of Diet Coke (yes, I’m one of those irrational people who eats like a starving hog but guzzles NutraSweet like a… dumb, thirsty hog), and started chatting with the owner, a friendly fellow named Halim.  It turns out that I’d stumbled into an Algerian restaurant.  To make the scene complete, another Algerian restaurateur—the owner of Nomad, an upscale North African restaurant in the East Village—happened to stop by for a chat.

At that moment, my life was perfect:  I was having a conversation with both of New York’s Algerian restaurant owners, while drinking a delicious, cancerous can of low-calorie soda.  Bliss!

not-quite-Moroccan brik

And for even more bliss, I came back for brunch the next day, accompanied by my three favorite women.  We started with an order of boureks ($5.95), consisting three delicious cigar-shaped rolls of fried phyllo dough, stuffed with ground beef, parsley, cheese, and flecks of egg.  The Algerian boureks were crispy and heartily spiced, and only a distant cousin of the soft, chewy versions served in Albanian, Serbian, Montenegrin, or Kosovar establishments.

One of Halim’s other Algerian specialties was an appetizer called brik ($3.95), a large, flat triangle of phyllo dough, stuffed with tuna, capers, parmesan cheese, parsley, and a slightly runny egg. Even more interesting was the gigantic frites/merguez omelette ($8.95), loaded with french fries and topped with harissa-spiked merguez sausage. (“Only in Algeria,” Halim grinned, when we inquired about the dish’s origins.)

NutraSweet might cause birth defects in full-grown adults, but merguez and french fries and eggs just cause blissed-out fatness

By the way, I drank nothing but water and deliciously fresh Moroccan mint tea with our brunch.  Nope, no Diet Coke for breakfast.  I’m over 30, but I’m convinced that it’s not too late to get birth defects from drinking too much NutraSweet.  So I try to keep my consumption under a gallon per day… but if you see me waddling down the street with flippers or a curly pink tail someday, you’ll know why.

Anyway, we loved the bourek and brik and omelette, but we were thoroughly blown away by the zaaluk salad ($3.95), an amazing puree of roasted eggplant and fresh herbs, served with warm pita bread.  To finish our meal, we munched a honey-drizzled plate of strawberries and beghrir (“North African pancakes,” $3.95), which resembled gigantic, soft, thick, puffy crepes; they were light and pleasantly spongy, and put even the best American-style pancakes to shame.

A few weeks later, we returned with a charismatic Kenyan-American chef, journalist and blogger named Adhis, who happens to be one of the world’s foremost experts on African food.  Chef Adhis’s amazing blog features plenty of content related to African culture, cuisine, and food security, but she’s particularly interested in exploring the question of why African food is so horrifically underappreciated in the United States.

delicious "North African" pancakes

And for what it’s worth, I wholeheartedly agree that African food is miserably underappreciated, even in NYC.  We live in the world’s most diverse city, but most of us have barely heard of African food from anyplace besides Morocco and Ethiopia.  And that’s sad, because we’re all missing out on great stuff from all over the continent; the United States would be a happier place if more restaurants offered Nigerian moi-moi or Malawian nsima or that amazing Malagasy cassava leaf dish.

But sadly, too few African restaurateurs seem willing to aggressively market their cuisine to non-African customers.  Personally, I’d love to see more African restaurateurs proudly proclaim their national origins on their awnings; I’m always a little bit sad when I see a restaurant call itself “African,” as if the entire continent features only one type of food.

amazing, no matter what the awning says

Then again, I can hardly blame Halim for letting customers and food bloggers assume that his wonderful Algerian cuisine is actually Moroccan.  Why scare American customers by putting an “obscure” country name on the awning?

Anyway, back to that amazing Algerian food.  On our second visit, we couldn’t resist starting with another round of zaaluk salad and boureks, all of which were every bit as good as the first time.  For our entrees, we enjoyed an impressive vegetarian couscous ($9.95), highlighted by some delicious chunks of pressure-cooked squash, turnip, and carrots.  We also inhaled an outstanding tajine (stewed leg of lamb, $11.95), accompanied by spiced peas and stewed artichokes.  And thanks to a recommendation by our wonderful (non-Algerian) waitress, we chomped our way through an incredible plate of lemon-roasted chicken ($10.95), served in a delicious sauce with tons of lemon and herbs de Provence.

It was among the best—and most reasonably priced—African meals you’ll find in NYC.  And Halim, who is one of the most genuinely warm restaurateurs I’ve met in New York, probably won’t even be all that offended if you accidentally call his food Moroccan instead of Algerian.

To learn more about African cuisine, visit Adhis’ outstanding blog, www.chefafrik.com, or follow her on twitter. And for a really boring time, follow United Nations of Food on twitter.

if you see me waddling down the street with flippers or a curly pink tail... it's not because of the tea

Harissa Café
3405 30th Ave., Astoria, Queens
Subway: 30th Ave. (N, Q trains)

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I’ve probably googled some variation on the phrase “Lao food NYC” at least 20 times since moving to New York… and yes, I might be crazy and obsessive. But more importantly, I came up empty every time.

I'm not upset about Lao sausage, though

This upsets me. It also upsets the amazing Robert Sietsema. It upsets me even more when I think about the fact that Lao food can be found in several other cities in the United States, including San Diego, Syracuse, Madison, and Des Moines.

Yes, Des Moines has a Lao restaurant. New York City does not. That’s tragic, unless you happen to live in Des Moines. (Hi, Mom.)

I was about to beg Mom to FedEx some Lao food from Des Moines, but then a friendly fellow named Jay Z (who runs a very interesting startup called DishEnvy) stumbled upon my food blog, and emailed me with a rumor that the owners of Mangez Avec Moi were from Laos.

let's just forget about the chef's warning that this stuff might make us "blow air", 'kay?

Thank you, Jay Z. Mangez Avec Moi’s owners are indeed from Laos, even though the menu is unabashedly “pan-Asian,” without even the slightest hint of Lao-ness. Luckily, Mangez Avec Moi’s chef, a lovely lady named Jeannie, was willing to prepare a special Lao banquet for a group of us, as long as we gave her a week’s notice to find the ingredients.

I asked Chef Jeannie to prepare Lao food the way she likes it—whatever that may mean. We didn’t discuss specific dishes or prices beforehand—we just made an appointment for 14 of us to eat whatever Jeannie wanted to prepare, at whatever price she wanted to charge.

And that worked perfectly.

When our group of 14 (including one of my favorite NYC international food bloggers, a talented journalist from an immigration website, and a brilliant “classical violinist gone wrong”) sat down, the food started coming at us in one huge, crunchy tsunami. Before we had a chance to settle in, our table was loaded with platters of food: homemade Lao sausage, similar to a good Andouille; surprisingly tender fingers of dried, spiced beef; spicy chunks of fried chicken; and a hot pepper and anchovy paste that went particularly well with the fried chicken. As with most Lao meals, our table was also adorned with bowls of sticky rice and tons of raw vegetables, including some particularly tasty longbeans and addictive, crunchy, round eggplants.

But wait, there’s more. We were treated to a no-holds-barred papaya salad, with tomatoes, longbeans, chicharron (fried pork rinds, which added a salty crunch to the salad), and some incredibly intense hot peppers; only a few of us were capsaicin-addicted enough to embrace the stuff. I loved it, but my poor fiancé could only handle one strand of shredded papaya at a time, and only if she chased it with a large swallow of Beerlao Dark… which, for the record, is pretty stellar stuff.

chicharron!

Wait, it gets even better. We ate a delicious rendition of laab, arguably the national dish of Laos: grilled chicken (including chicken hearts and kidneys), finely diced with mint, garlic, scallions, and galangal (a tasty ginger relative). The laab was the source of some wonderful unintentional post-meal comedy: several of my pals thought that Chef Jeannie had called it “lamb” instead of “laab.” One diner was particularly horrified when I told her that the dish contained hearts and kidneys. Hurray!

"Lamb." Or not.

And then there was my personal favorite, a moist mushroom-spinach-longbean-chicken sauté called or. Part of the magic seemed to be the combination of two types of mushrooms with fresh greens, but most of the brilliance came from the blend of dill and hot peppers, which are two of my favorite seasonings on any continent. Both seasonings in one dish? I was in heaven.

And somehow, we had room for dessert after all of that. We shared some excellent plates of sliced mango with sticky rice, covered in a thickened coconut milk with a drizzle of sesame seeds. I happily ate a bite, and then returned to devouring as much or as I could fit into my gullet.

and I would follow Chef Jeannie to the ends of the Earth for another bowl of this stuff

We would have adored Chef Jeannie simply for the food alone, but we all fell madly in love with her when she spent most of the night at our table, telling us about Lao food and culture. She explained that Lao meals never include multiple courses—everything is eaten at the same time, and Lao diners typically eat with their hands, scooping the rest of the goodies with fistfuls of sticky rice. Interestingly, Lao women traditionally eat nothing but sticky rice, grilled galangal, and hot water for a month after childbirth; apparently, this regimen radically improves post-partum recovery. Fascinating, no?

delicious, but not an approved part of the post-partum Lao diet

In addition providing amazing food and intriguing cultural insights, Chef Jeannie was simply a quote machine: “After you eat McDonald’s hamburgers, your belly feels loose. Eat sticky rice, and your belly feels tight, you’re good for 7 or 10 hours.” “Everything we make is with raw vegetables, and there’s lots of herbs in the food. If you’re not used to it, you’ll blow lots of air afterward,” she said, gesturing toward her hindquarters. We could have listened to her all night. (Her thoughts on food, I mean—not the air.)

Our love for our Lao chef didn’t even fade when the bill arrived. We ended up paying an incredibly reasonable $27 per person, and that price included Lao beer and an extra-fat tip for our waiter. And several of us took home leftovers—I very happily ate my beloved or for two more meals.

I have no idea if many of my pals “blew air” afterward, as Chef Jeannie threatened. But if they did, it was surely worth the stench.

Huge thanks to Jay Zygmunt for tipping us off to the secret Lao-ness of Mangez Avec Moi.  For a hot time, check out his website at www.dishenvy.com, or follow DishEnvy on twitter.  For a not-so-hot time, follow United Nations of Food on twitter.

my hero

Mangez Avec Moi (“pan-Asian” cuisine; Lao food served with advance notice only)
71-73 West Broadway
Subway: Chambers Street (1, 2, 3, A, C trains)

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Generally speaking, restaurant servers are completely full of s#!t. I worked as a waiter for nearly a decade, and was specifically trained to lie through my teeth. A typical waiter-customer interaction goes something like this:

Waiter:  “Today’s special is the chef’s magnificent dark gravy stew.”
Customer:  “Oh. What’s in it? Is it good?”
Waiter:  “It’s made from runny, lukewarm poo mixed with shards of broken glass, but it’s really quite outstanding. I had it for dinner tonight myself. I highly recommend it.”

definitely not made from runny poo with shards of broken glass

I hate it when waiters say “everything here is good” when you ask for a recommendation. That’s bulls#!t. Nearly every restaurant has at least a few relatively crappy dishes. As an ex-full-of-s#!t waiter, I enormously respect the rare, honest servers who have the balls to steer customers away from menu items that are relatively sucky.

O Lavrador, a vaguely legendary Portuguese restaurant at the end of the Earth subway line in Queens, may or may not have relatively sucky dishes. I wouldn’t know. Our wonderful waiter wouldn’t let us order any of them.

At the very least, none of our appetizers were remotely sucky. We started with boiled octopus with paprika and olive oil ($13), which was probably even more tender than the severely beaten stuff we ate at a Spanish restaurant in Astoria. (Perhaps our dapper Portuguese-American waiter had let his fury out on the octopus before we arrived, and that’s why both he and the octopus were so warm and friendly?) We also munched clams steamed in a white wine-garlic-parsley brine ($9) and shrimp stewed in mildly spicy piri-piri sauce ($8).

Yes, this man is setting my sausage on fire. Wait... that doesn't sound right.

The octopus, clams, and shrimp were all pretty darned tasty. But the most exciting of our appetizers was… drum roll please… flaming homemade sausage (chourico caseiro, $15).

(Right now, every male reader of my blog is squirming.)

Yes, they set our sausages aflame, right next to our table. Once I finished squirming at the thought of seeing another sausage-shaped item receive the business end of a torch, I realized that the flaming sausage was going to be pretty damned tasty. The flames gave the sausage an appealingly crispy casing, not unlike a good Puerto Rican morcilla; the sausage itself was firm, salty, and not particularly spicy, and reminded me of some homemade ham I ate on a visit to Poland.

once our sausages were set aflame and chopped into pieces, it was very clear that they did not contain chimp feces

As the four of us were finishing up our (excessive) appetizers, our brilliant waiter began to take control again. We were a chatty, curious group, and asked him about almost everything on the menu. And the waiter was bizarrely, wonderfully honest: he would either say “yes, that’s always good” or “you know, I can’t guarantee that you’ll love that dish.” Once, he even said, “you know, I think that dish is made from chimp feces and yak hair.”

OK, fine. I’m making that last part up.

We finally settled on three entrees. The grilled salt cod, served with grilled peppers, onions, tomatoes, garlic, and potatoes ($20), was appealing enough, thanks in large part to the deliciously charred peppers and the garlicky olive oil we slathered on the potatoes. The seafood stew ($21), consisting of lobster, shrimp, clams, and mussels in a creamy parsley sauce, was equally solid, thanks to the generous dose of parsley. And I loved the seemingly incongruous pairing of clams and cubed pork, served with fried potatoes in a thick, brown gravy (carne de porco a alentejana, $16). It turns out that clams and dead pigs were probably meant to be together.

pigs really love swimming in brown gravy, and lobsters would be happier if the ocean was seasoned with parsley

Were our entrees mind-blowing? Nope. But they were good. And the unusually cheap ($17) bottles of Portuguese red wine were great. And we pretty much forced our wonderful server to hang out at our table all night, answering every question we could possibly have about Portuguese food… though I’ll admit that I was focused on stuffing my face, and really didn’t pay much attention to the conversation.

we deserved a cookie, I guess

Somehow, while I was focused on sopping up the last bits of pig-and-clam-flavored gravy, my companions arranged for a round of desserts. We shared a warm poached pear with vanilla ice cream, some perfectly appealing crème brulee, and a surprisingly delicious cream-and-cookie parfait called serradura. It was the simplest dessert ever: alternating layers of crushed vanilla cookies and cream. And it was better than the crème brulee, for my taste.

And since our waiter’s generosity knows no boundaries, he brought us complimentary glasses of port (white and red), despite the fact that he had already spent nearly the entire evening at our table, and we probably owed him a few drinks at that point. And then he brought out a bottle of… well, moonshine, pretty much. It was a bottle of homemade aguardente, with a large, bloated pear somehow wedged into the bottle.

It tasted surprisingly good, but packed one hell of a punch; it was the alcoholic equivalent of a pleasant-smelling woman who makes soothing noises right before kicking you in the balls. Apparently, I like that sort of thing, at least in its alcoholic form.

Anyway, O Lavrador is a classy place, and I’m sure that none of their dishes ever actually contain runny poo with bits of broken glass in it. But I still think it’s pretty cool that our waiter made sure that we didn’t find out.

who wouldn't enjoy getting kicked in the balls by a shiny bottle?

O Lavrador Restaurant & Bar
138-40 101st Ave., Jamaica, Queens
Subway: Sutphin-Archer (E, J, Z trains)

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