Whenever I think about eating British food, a litany of tired, insulting clichés inevitably jump to mind.  Really, does anybody—other than British chefs and British nationalists—ever say anything good about British food?

meat with gravy, modern British style

It would be really easy for me to go to a British-owned pub, eat a soggy pot pie or lifeless fried fish, write a snarky post about it, and cross the U.K. off my list.  But I feel like I’ve already been cruel enough to restaurants featuring food from British commonwealth countries (I still feel kind of bad about savaging poor Nelson Blue and The Australian, both of which are charming as hell if you’re just looking for New Zealand or Aussie beer), so I decided to make a concerted effort to find British food that I could discuss in glowing terms.  No fish and chips, no pot pie, no bangers.

Luckily, the national dish of Britain is now… drum roll please… curry!  According to Robin Cook, the former U.K. Foreign Secretary (equivalent to our Secretary of State), chicken tikka masala is the British national dish, which makes me really, really happy.

So you might be wondering: how the hell could Indian curry qualify as the national dish of Great Britain?  It turns out that chicken tikka masala was actually invented in London by Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani immigrants who operated London’s curry houses in the 1960s and 1970s.  Chicken tikka masala obviously has its roots in South Asian curries, but the British version of the dish was supposedly made creamier to “satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy,” as Foreign Secretary Robin Cook once put it.  So yeah… chicken tikka masala is an authentic British phenomenon.

no really, its British

And as luck would have it, a team of Brits and Indians opened a pair of restaurants in NYC called Brick Lane Curry House and Brick Lane Curry House Too, specializing in curries prepared in the style of London’s curry houses.  Brick Lane is mostly known for its (thoroughly un-British) Phaal challenge, as seen on the TV show Man vs. Food:  the restaurant gives you a free beer and a place in their Phaal of Phame Fame if you manage to choke down a plate of their hottest curry… which is so toxic that it’s prepared by a chef in a gas mask.

Brick Lane’s “British” chicken tikka masala, for better or worse, requires no gas mask.  As one might expect from an authentic British dish, the chicken tikka masala ($10 for the lunch special, served with rice, naan, raita, and a small fruit salad) was pretty tame.  I love a good, fiery curry, but this was more like a slightly peppery, mildly creamy tomato sauce, with far more sweetness than fire.  And I guess that’s exactly the point.  Meat with gravy, right?

not really British, but pretty damned tasty

Since Brick Lane’s ownership group includes both Indians and Brits, I couldn’t resist trying another dish, even if it wouldn’t be anywhere near as “British” as the chicken tikka masala.  I tried the chef’s special lamb kebab roll ($9), which consisted of a beautifully fluffy piece of naan stuffed with spiced lamb, onions, peppers, and chutney.  This dish, thankfully, had a nice bite to it; it had the fire of a good curry, but with the solidness of a great burrito.

The lamb kebab roll was obviously inspired by the Indian side of Brick Lane’s ancestry, and it’s hard for me to pretend that the sweetened, tame plate of chicken tikka masala is anywhere near as good as a well-executed chunk of spicy Indian-style lamb.  But I think we can all agree that even an overly sweet chicken tikka masala is a huge upgrade over a soggy, pub-style chicken pot pie.

Brick Lane Curry House Too
235 East 53rd Street, Midtown
Subway: Lexington-53rd (E, M trains)

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I probably whine about this far too much, but I was just realizing that Amber, love of my life and miner of her own engagement diamond, has accompanied me on exactly six of my first 38 food excursions—seven if you count the time that I brought Chinese dumplings home and slid them under the bedroom door while she was locked in there, studying her little ass off. The moral of the story: law school really sucks, and makes you miss most of the good meals that your future husband eats.

balls in salty broth

So it was a really nice treat to be able to take her with me to Mustang Thakali Kitchen, a Nepali restaurant in Queens… especially since it was a Monday night, when nothing fun ever usually happens in the life of a law student.

As is often the case, I knew almost nothing about Nepali food before walking into the restaurant. I knew that rice and dal (stewed lentils) and momos (dumplings) are generally considered the national dishes of Nepal, so I figured I should eat some of those. Mustang Thakali Kitchen’s menu seemed to really push “traditional Nepali” dishes called thalis (very loose unofficial translation: “shiny round combo platter,” inevitably including rice and dal), so we figured that it would be wise to order a couple of those. On the restaurant’s list of thalis, there were two options that I’d never heard of—farsee goat thali ($11.95) and ghundruk thali ($9.95)—so of course we ordered them.

careful, the "tomato" is pretty ferocious

I have a feeling that momos, like most other Asian dumplings, range in quality from pretty good to mind-numbingly amazing; Thakali Kitchen’s momo soup ($4.75) was merely pretty good, featuring tasty-but-nondescript noodle-y balls stuffed with cabbage, carrots, and chicken, floating in an unremarkable, salty chicken broth. (That last sentence exists only because I wanted an excuse to write the phrase “noodle-y balls.”) The soup was a perfectly good start to a chilly late-winter night in NYC, but not, by itself, worth the trip from Midtown to Jackson Heights.

The thalis, however, were fantastic. When we ordered our meals, our Nepali server was apparently amused by our big, goofy grins and horrible pronunciation of Nepali food terms, and generously took the time to educate us when he brought us our meals. Ghundruk, he explained, is a mushroom stew with mung beans, not unlike a mushroom-flavored dal; farsee goat is a pumpkin stew with… well, goat. With his tongue firmly planted in cheek, he then grinned mischievously, and pointed to every single item on our platters: “That’s rice. And that’s lentil dal. And that’s curried cauliflower and potato. And that’s a cucumber. And that’s a radish. And those are vegetables. And that’s a tomato.”

Pretty funny. The “vegetables” were mustard greens and squash, braised in a salty brine. When he said “tomato” with an evil glint in his eye, he was pointing to a delicious, fiery red condiment that tasted more like roasted hot peppers than tomatoes. The “radish” was a couple of cubes of daikon, smothered in an even spicier yellow sauce. The “cucumber” was actually a slice of cucumber.

ghundruk and farsee goat

Despite the iffy start with the momo soup, we were unequivocally thrilled with the thalis. Goat, in my humble opinion, can be a little bit hit-or-miss; a bad plate of goat makes me think of a smelly barn, but good goat is delicious. The farsee goat at Mustang Thakali Kitchen was a little bit tough and stringy, but tasted fantastic in its lightly pumpkin-ized sauce. The ghundruk (mushroom stew) and dal (lentils) were surprisingly rich, and had an almost creamy consistency.

For all of the wonderfulness of the goat, dal, and ghundruk, I was particularly crazy about the hot sauce (the one that the server called “tomato”) and the fiery pickled daikon—which almost brought my lovely fiancé to tears. The upshot is that it’s hard not to love a place that serves so many different spicy bowls of awesomeness on a single, shiny platter… and even harder not to love a place whose servers get a kick out of trying to convince its novice customers that hot sauce is really just a tomato.

Thakali Kitchen
74-14 37th Ave., Queens
Subway: Roosevelt Ave.-Jackson Heights (7,E,F,M,R trains)

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Help me out here: why is it that the Philippines is spelled the way it is, but a person from the Philippines is a Filipino? Why change the “Ph” to an “F”? Why drop the extra “p”? Is somebody from Philadelphia called a Filadelfian? Is a guy from Frankfurt called a Phrankphurter? Then why is somebody from the Philippines called a Filipino? I don’t get it.

lumpia

In other news, I ate at Ihawan 2 in Long Island City, which is a slick-looking cousin to the legendary Philippino (er, sorry… Filipino) place in Woodside, Queens. The original Ihawan is a classic, rough-around-the-edges NYC dive with great food and not-too-refined ambiance and service. Ihawan 2, oddly enough, is an uber-modern, trendy-looking place that bears almost no resemblance to the original. And it serves sushi, for f*ck’s sake! Ever heard of Filipino sushi? Right.

I was pretty worried that the “copy” of Ihawan wouldn’t work out so well, but we were thrilled with the food. We started with lumpia, crepe-like pancakes stuffed with vegetables (mostly cabbage, carrots, and onions) and topped with a gentle, sweet peanut sauce. For our entrees, we took a shot at two national dishes of the Philippines: adobo and lechon (roast pig).

adobo chicken in salty, sugary, vinegary awesomeness

I’m no expert on Philippino phood Filipino food, but we loved all of it. The lumpia ($6.50) was everything you’d want out of a spring roll with a gentle peanut sauce, except that it wasn’t deep-fried, so we could convince ourselves that we were actually eating something healthy. We had no such illusions about our entrees: the adobo ($7.50) consisted of ludicrously tender dark-meat chicken, swimming in a salty brown stew of soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, and pepper… which tastes infinitely better than it sounds.

Our other entrée, paksiw na lechon ($8), was described on the menu as “pork cooked w/soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, and liver sauce.” Liver sauce? I’m not necessarily anti-liver (I have a very large, greenish one, and I like it very much), but liver sauce? I had no idea what I was getting into. Would it actually have a liver-y flavor?

not liver-y, unless liver tastes like carmelized onions

As it turns out, the dish was a little bit on the oily side, but with no hint of organ meat—just wonderfully soft pork with deliciously gooey flaps of skin still on it, coated in a sweet, lightly peppery sauce that tasted strongly of carmelized onions. I can’t say that I’ve eaten many pig livers in my life, but our liver-sauce coated pork was extremely sweet, at least by the standards of meat dishes. Can we then conclude that pig livers taste like candy? (Don’t answer that.)

Although I was leery of Ihawan 2 because of its slick design, I have to admit that it was a really comfortable place. There’s a cute little bar in the front of the restaurant, serving sake, wine (try the organic Chilean Carmenere), and beer. The service was unbelievably good: in addition to being a lovely, friendly individual, our waitress brought me a new napkin and picked up the one I had dropped on the floor—before I even noticed that I’d dropped it. Really, who does that? Especially in a place in NYC where you can get dinner for two (one appetizer, two entrees, a glass of wine, a glass of sake) for a mere $35.93, including tax. Sometimes slick, modern copies of the classics aren’t so bad after all.

no need to hide... liver sauce is pretty good

Ihawan 2
1007 50th Avenue, Long Island City
Subway: Vernon-Jackson (7 train)

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beef, kangaroo, or the lovechild of a cow and a lamb?

In preparation for my (possible) upcoming (fantasy?) trip to Australia, I decided that it was time to eat some kangaroo salad.  You know, since I’m all about stereotypes and stuff, I figured that the national dish of Australia has to be marsupial meat of some kind… so why not chop up a kangaroo and put it in a salad?  Luckily (or not) there’s a pub in Midtown Manhattan called The Australian that conveniently serves a kangaroo salad… and plenty of strong beer so that I could kill the taste if I needed to.

Judged by NYC pub standards, The Australian is an attractive, comfortable place, with a deliciously excessive array of televisions tuned to various sports stations.  Both of the servers had cute Australian accents; the female bartender was just plain cute.  I mean, really—what’s not to like?  (The accents were infinitely more convincing than the dude who pretends to be Australian on the commercials for the Tampa-based Outback Steakhouse chain—which, oddly enough, has six locations in Australia and two restaurants on a single block in Seoul, South Korea.)

there is no “i” in team, but there is still an “i” in meat pie, and there is definitely an “i” in industrial food service fries

The Australian had a nice atmosphere, but the food was pretty darned disappointing—though not necessarily for the reason that I would have expected.  I figured that ordering kangaroo salad ($14) was a little bit risky:  I had no idea what kangaroo meat might taste like, and worried that I might hate the stuff.  At the very least, I could be sure that the salad would be good—you can’t go wrong with raw vegetables, at least not in my world.

I had it completely backward.  I was nervous about eating such a cute, bouncy, golf-loving animal, but it turns out that the little cubes of grilled kangaroo meat were thoroughly non-threatening.  The kangaroo meat was about as tender as an average cut of sirloin, and only a little bit gamier than beef; if you’d told me that I was eating beef, I might have believed you.  If you told me that a lamb and a cow had a lovechild, I probably wouldn’t believe you, but I’m pretty sure that the grilled lovechild would taste somewhat like kangaroo meat.  (If anybody out there has eaten the lovechild of a lamb and a cow, please let me know.)

best Aussie meat pie in NYC

The salad itself (chickpeas, julienned cucumbers, some sort of lettuce relative, tomatoes, red onions) was horribly disappointing, even though the kangaroo meat was perfectly good.  I love chickpeas and cucumbers as much as the next guy, but the entire salad had a vaguely acrid taste to it, as if they’d opened a can of chickpeas, let it soak in vinegar for a few days, and then served it in all of its acidic, not-so-fresh glory.  We also ordered an Australian meat pie ($8.95), which was small, soggy, and boring.  New Zealanders have warned me that meat pies are never spectacular, so I wasn’t too shocked, but it was still a pretty lame meal overall.  But at least we got a notch on our food blogger belts for eating kangaroo, right?

yes, that’s a crapload of bacon on the brekkie pie

Since I’ve now had bad experiences with overpriced Australian and New Zealand-ese food in NYC, I thought I’d give the region’s cuisine one last chance before I decide to spend three weeks in Australia.  The day after our trek to The Australian, I headed to Tuck Shop in the East Village in a desperate attempt to develop a taste for Aussie pies.

Mercifully, Tuck Shop is awesome.  The meat pie ($5.50) was a completely different beast than the soggy, salty version I ate at The Australian—the crust was flaky, the filling had a nice peppery bite to it, and the meat wasn’t cloyingly greasy.  We also munched our way through two different versions of Tuck Shop’s brekkie pie ($4 each… and if everybody in Australia uses the word “brekkie”, I think I’ll love the place), which were dense, flaky, cholesterol-filled bricks of heavenliness.  Really:  a pie stuffed with eggs, beans, peppers, tomatoes, cheese, onions, ground beef, and potatoes?  And topped with bacon, if you want?  Brilliant.

Each pie was barely larger than my fist, but probably weighed a pound.  Two of us shared three pies, and we both had food comas that lasted about four hours—a sure sign that something had gone desperately right with our $13.50 Aussie brekkie.  Thank you, Tuck Shop, for restoring my faith in Australian food.

Tuck Shop brekkie pie, without bacon

The Australian NYC
20 West 38th Street, Midtown Manhattan
Subway: Bryant Park (B, D, F, M trains) or 5th Ave. (7 train)

Tuck Shop
68 East 1st Street, Manhattan
Subway: 2nd Ave-Lower East Side (F train)

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morcilla might taste more awesomer than it looks

OK, fine… so I realize that Puerto Rico isn’t technically a country, but as a self-proclaimed lover of ethnic food in New York City, I’d have to be a real jackass to disrespect Boricua cuisine. We all agree that the colony—er, I mean the “associated free state”—of Puerto Rico could be its own country, right? (If, of course, both American and Puerto Rican politics functioned a little bit differently.) And we all agree that perníl (roast pig) and mofongo (a plantain mash topped with stew) and morcilla (Puerto Rican blood sausage) are all awesome, right?

When I started looking around for good NYC Puerto Rican food last year, I turned to my buddy Rene, who split his childhood between New York and Puerto Rico. He was pretty dismissive of the New York Boricua food scene: “I’m not sure that there are any good Puerto Rican places around. Dominicans run much better restaurants. But if you find a really good perníl, let me know.”

empanada, pernil, and the torso of a happy Puerto Rican

Hey, wait a minute! The Puerto Rican is supposed to find the good New York Puerto Rican food for the white boy from Iowa, not the other way around. *sigh*

So after several months of asking around, poking through forums, and sampling a few random places that I stumbled upon in my travels… I finally found some kickass perníl at East Harlem’s auspiciously named Lechonera del Barrio (my Spanish is getting pretty rusty, but I think that translates roughly to “Roast Piggery of the Neighborhood”) and dragged Rene with me to gorge ourselves silly.

mofongo, without chicken slurry

We both showed up with somewhat of an agenda, which meant—as usual—that we should have brought a third stomach to help us out with everything. Rene loves morcilla and pastelito de queso (fried cheese empanadas), so we started with those. Of course, we had to order perníl (otherwise known as lechón, or roast pig) and mofongo, since those are arguably the two national dishes of Puerto Rico. Two men, four dishes? No problem.

You can never go wrong with fried cheese empanadas—especially when they cost a mere $1.25 each—but the morcilla ($3.25) absolutely dominated our attention for the first fifteen minutes of our meal. Puerto Rican-style morcilla is actually meatless, containing only a sweet, black mixture of pig blood (mmmm!), rice, peppers, and spices; the sausage is then fried in vegetable oil until it’s wonderfully crispy on the outside. I’ve never been much of a blood sausage fan, but I loved the stuff.

mofongo, with chicken slurry

For my main course, I insisted on trying mofongo ($8), an intensely dense mash of boiled green plantains, bits of meat (usually some sort of pig), and lots of salt and pepper, topped with a slurry of shredded chicken and spices. (Variations on mofongo could include yucca instead of plantains, and the chicken stew could be traded for pork, shrimp, or chicharron, among many other things.) I love plantains and chicken as much as the next guy, but the stew might have benefited from a bit more seasoning, and it was hard to get past the monotonous heaviness of the mofongo. A smarter man would order mofongo without appetizers, and only on a day when he’s supremely hungry; I enjoyed the dish, but left an unusually large lump of it on my plate… partly due to the brilliance of the rest of our food.

pernil... with a big, crispy chunk of chicharron

There’s clearly an art to roasting a pig, and the biggest hit of our meal was the perníl (or lechón or roast pig), served with yellow rice and beans as part of the lunch special ($6). The perníl was wonderfully salty, fatty and chewy, without being remotely tough, greasy, or gristly. Partway through the meal, Rene pointed to a hardened brown square that resembled a piece of polished tree bark. “You gotta try some of this—it’s the best part.” I broke off a chunk, and chomped on a crunchy, fatty, salty piece of… chicharron (pork skin). Rene was absolutely right—it was delicious. It wasn’t unlike a great piece of bacon, but with a better crunch and a more subtle, meaty flavor.

Throughout the meal, I tried to goad Rene into talking about his favorite family meals, and he kept mentioning one of his aunts, who is revered as his family’s best cook. As much as I enjoyed our food, I was worried that I’d brought my Puerto Rican friend to a place that wouldn’t meet his standards—though I know that Rene is usually too easygoing to complain.

So I asked him how Lechonera ranked on a scale of 1 to 10—with 10, of course, being his aunt’s cooking. Lechonera scored an 8.5 on the Rene scale. I’d call that one hell of a compliment.

shoulda brought an extra stomach

Lechonera El Barrio
172 East 103rd Street, East Harlem
Subway: 103rd Street (6 train)

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