In case you can’t tell from my little food blog, I’ve rarely met a plate of ethnic food I didn’t like.  Sure, I can get snarky if I think a particular restaurant is lame, but if you stick a plate of food in front of me, I’ll probably eat it with a smile on my face—even if it contains pickled fish or cow hooves.

like it should be, but without the eyes

But there’s a special place in my heart for Korean food.  When I was a teenager living in a small Midwestern town, my cosmopolitan older sister introduced me to Korean food in the big, bad city of Chicago.  I fell madly in love with a tiny hole-in-the-wall called Jim’s Grill in West Lakeview, and got a little teary-eyed when I found out that the owners lost their lease a few years ago.  I have vague, drunken memories of visiting a 24-hour Korean BBQ somewhere in Chicago whenever I drank a few too many Old Styles—it was the first time I’d frequented a restaurant that served every bibimbap order with a bunch of little plates of condiments and snacks, half of which were looking up at us with their little fishy eyes.

Hey, that’s exotic shit if you’re from Iowa—small, fishy things, with the eyeballs still attached?  Crazy, man.

Fast-forward 15 or so years, and Korean food isn’t quite as exotic anymore.  My small Iowa hometown has a Korean restaurant, my fiancée’s small upstate New York hometown has two Korean restaurants, and several corner delis in Midtown serve bibimbap and bulgogi at lunchtime.  Bibimbap is everywhere now, and that’s mostly a good thing.

non-castrated bibimbap

The only trouble is that a lot of the bibimbap has been sanitized for the Midwestern or Midtown markets.  Gone are the unidentifiable pickled things and little fishy guys with their eyes still attached; Americanized Korean bibimbap often has little spice, lame condiments, and no weird fishy stuff at all.  A few years ago, I was lucky enough to visit Seoul several times while working with a Korean publisher, and developed a taste for all sorts of Korean appetizers and bibimbap accompaniments, including dried fish products, marinated fish skin, noodle-stuffed pig intestines, egg-wrapped sushi, and a huge variety of unidentifiable pickled vegetables.  I’ve never met a plate of bibimbap I didn’t like, but I always do get a little bit sad whenever I see bibimbap that has been castrated and sterilized to suit the American palate.

Luckily, New York still has plenty of real Koreans who serve real Korean food.  While I was on a hunt for a Paraguayan bakery in Woodside (sadly, La Uruguaya y La Paraguaya bakery has changed hands, and no longer features any Paraguayans), I stumbled into Koba Korean Barbeque, a small, nondescript-looking place on a quiet stretch of Roosevelt Avenue.  I wasn’t looking for Korean food on this particular day… but there was something about Koba that made me think that the food would be brilliant.

who doesn't love salty, firm fish jello?

I wasn’t disappointed at all.  The bibimbap lunch special ($8.95, including hot tea, miso soup, and a soda) came with lots of beautiful little plates of legitimate Korean goodies:  pickled seaweed and carrots, fried breaded tofu with hot sauce, kimchi, marinated eggplant and zucchini, and plenty of extra rice and hot sauce.  The main bibimbap bowl also contained its fair share of goodies:  sprouts, lettuce, another type of seaweed, some marinated mushrooms, some gently seasoned chicken, and a sunny-side-up egg—served appropriately runny, as it should be.

But for my taste, the most important element of the meal was the little dish filled with one my favorite gross-sounding foods:  chunks of salty, gelatinous fish skin.  Imagine the satisfying saltiness of a potato chip mixed with the gratifying chewiness of a Starburst candy… but with a nice fishy taste.  (Wow, that description completely failed, didn’t it?  Salty fish jello, anybody?  No really, I swear… it’s actually good.)

Koba’s bibimbap brought back fond memories of the crazy winter I spent shuttling back and forth to Seoul, among other places.  In the space of four months, I flew from Brazil to Miami to Chicago to Beijing to Seoul to Beijing to Chicago to North Carolina to San Francisco to Seoul to San Jose to DC to Chicago to Tokyo to Singapore to Kuala Lumpur to Seoul to Kyoto to Honolulu to Chicago to DC… where I promptly quit my job in a fit of overworked, underpayed, jet-lagged misery.  My life sucked for those four months, but it was probably worthwhile.  After all, I got to eat real bibimbap in Seoul about 25 times during those visits.

And I completely understand that in the eyes of many Manhattanites, Koba’s Woodside location might as well be Seoul… but I’m just happy to get my getatinous fish skins without having to suffer through any more jetlag.

Koba Korean Restaurant
64-16 Roosevelt Avenue, Woodside
Subway: 61st Street-Woodside (7 train)

Share

I don’t think of myself as a vain or prissy sort of guy, but I have a mildly weird obsession with finding the right barber.  Whenever I move to a new city, I’ll keep trying new places until I find exactly the right dude who makes me look tolerably clean.

For whatever reason, I had one hell of a bad time finding a good barber in New York when I first got here.  I’ve had my hair cut by at least eight different guys within a ten-block radius of Tudor City.  The interesting part?  Every single one has been a Russian-speaking Jew from somewhere in the former Soviet Union.

Some of these guys have been better barbers than others, but nearly all of them have taught me some fascinating things about Jewish history, Russian history, Uzbek history, and/or New York City.  Here are a few of my favorites:

• China is home to the Kaifeng Jews, a tiny group that managed to preserve their traditions from the 12th century onward, despite being completely isolated from other Jews until the 18th century.
• About 300,000 Bukharian Jews, who speak a dialect of Persian, survived several centuries of on-and-off persecution in central Asia, primarily near the Uzbek city of Bukhara.  All but a few hundred of the Bukharian Jews abandoned central Asia in the 1990s, and roughly 50,000 of them settled in Rego Park and Forest Hill.
• Rego Park is affectionately known in some circles as “Queensistan,” thanks to the immigrant population.
• Rego Park is home to several restaurants that serve Bukharian food, which is, from what I can tell, f*cking awesome.  (More on that later.)
• Rego Park is also home to Wiggles, which is possibly the best-named Gentleman’s Club in NYC.
• In addition to having the second-largest Bukharian Jew population in the world, Rego Park probably has the largest population of Russian-speaking barbers outside of Russia.
• Barbers and stylists often work under pseudonyms–the hair world’s equivalent of pen names (scissor names?).  My favorite barber, a Russian who spent much of his childhood in Israel, introduced himself as “Steve.”  My fiancé’s stylist is a Kazakh who goes by “Turbo.”  Yes, Turbo the Kazakh.  (He’s awesome.  My fiancé looks totally hot, even without clothes.)

like an aging foodie... short, round, and crusty

Thanks to a recommendation by Steve the Russian barber, I spent an evening gorging myself silly on Bukharian food at Tandoori Bakery (not to be confused with Tandoor, a nearby Indian joint).  Tandoori Bakery felt much like a Spanish tapas place… well, minus the Spanish food.  And I guess the décor was nothing like a Spanish place.  And the house band was playing classic Bukharian hits from Central Asia.

But like a tapas joint, Tandoori’s menu contains a few full entrees, but most of the dishes are small plates:  salads, soups, breads, appetizers and kabobs, served one skewer at a time.  This was absolutely brilliant, since it gave us a chance to order more plates of food than would otherwise be possible.  My dining companion for the evening was my extremely petite Russian friend, Rimma, who seems to thrive on about 800 calories a day.  No worries, though:  we managed to order five different items at Tandoori, despite Rimma’s tendency to eat a few crumbs and then proclaim that she’s too full to eat another bite.

(And just so you don’t think that I’m hating on poor Rimma:   she deserves huge props for being able to eat pretty much anything.  Stinky fermented fish, organ meats, and head cheese are among her favorite foods, and that makes me love

larger and juicier than they look

her like a sister.)

We started with lepeshka ($2), a short, round, crusty loaf of bread baked in a clay oven.  (Now that I think about it, the phrase “short, round, crusty” will probably describe me perfectly in about 30 years.)  We also ordered a pickled salad ($5), which consisted of a delicious mix of vinegarized (I just made that word up—it should exist, right?) beets, cucumbers, green tomatoes, half a head of beet-dyed cabbage, and an entire bulb of raw garlic, also dyed beet red.  Rimma, who loves to brag about how much she “loves stinky food,” got really excited by the lightly pickled garlic, crunched on a clove or two, and immediately had enough gastrointestinal burning to suppress her appetite for the rest of the meal.  She also guaranteed that nobody would be kissing her goodnight anytime in the next week.

The bread and pickled green tomatoes were absolutely incredible, and I easily could have gnawed on them all night, without even thinking about eating anything else.  But that would be silly, since there was a huge, 50-item menu to conquer.  We ordered a lamb chop kabob ($4.75 ) which was deliciously charred and fatty, and nearly as large as

almost as big as her garlic-scented head

Rimma’s head.  I’m not convinced that salmon are native to Uzbekistan, but that didn’t stop us from ordering a salmon kabob, which was slightly overcooked, but still a nice little snack for the price ($3.99).

But the highlight of the meal was the manty, a giant, thin-skinned dumpling, comparable to Russian pelmeni or a less-doughy version of Polish pierogies.  Tandoori’s manty ($5 for three) were filled with ground lamb, onion, and a few flecks with pepper, and then steamed until they became a delicious, slippery, scallion-topped mess.  I felt badly for poor Rimma, who was suffering from painful garlic belches and barely touched her manty; the good news was, I got to eat even more of them.

It wouldn’t be hard to convince me that we did a pretty incomplete job of sampling the many wonders of Uzbek and Bukharian cuisine—we didn’t get around to ordering pilav (or plov, a variation on rice pilaf, generally considered to be the national dish of Uzbekistan) or lagman (noodle soup).  Next time, we’ll bring a few more stomachs—and we’ll make them stay away from the pickled garlic.

Wanna read about tasty Uzbek horsemeat at a NYC restaurant?  Click here.  Wanna follow a really boring, overfed food blogger on twitter?  Click here.

Tandoori Bukharian Bakery
99-04 63rd Rd., Rego Park
Subway: 63rd Ave-Rego Park (E, M, R trains)

Share

I’m half Greek and half Russian, which means that I’m supposed to fully hate Turks, Turkey, and everything Turkish.  I don’t hate anybody, of course, but I was raised with some very specific ideas about the centuries of battles between Turks and Greeks.

For example, my Greek father taught me that everything that is good in the world was invented by Greeks.  Gyros, democracy, baklava, mathematics, kabobs, philosophy, moussaka, and banana splits were all supposedly invented by Greeks.  (We all know that sex was also invented by the ancient Greeks; Italians introduced it to women.)  I was taught that my ancestors were writing great works of literature and philosophy while everybody else was still swinging from trees.  And I was taught that Turks are scum.

Of course, I hate all of the stupid intolerant Greek superiority crap, and I have no taste for the spiteful BS about Turks.  But I have to admit that I actually believed some of the food-based stuff that my Greek father taught me:  I never thought that Greeks invented banana splits or kabobs, but I always assumed that gyros were an authentically Greek creation from our ancestral past.

not Greek, not bad... but not impressive, either

So when an Istanbul-based fast food chain called Eat & Go opened a kiosk in Midtown East, I was surprised to see gyros on the menu.  Of course, the word “gyro” had a subtitle:  doner kebab.  I thought that was pretty silly:  why would an authentic Turkish restaurant—based in Istanbul!—serve Greek food?  After all, Greeks invented gyros.  I mean, I totally understand that gyros and doner kebabs are pretty much the same thing, but don’t the Turks have some original food of their own that they can sell us?

Sorry, Turkey:  my bad.  Gyros are all yours.  So are doner kebabs.  You’re the inventors, Greek-Americans are the thieves.

Thanks to the joys of Wikipedia, I discovered that doner kebabs were invented in Turkey in the 18^th century.  Greeks didn’t begin to eat anything similar until the 1950s, when doner kebabs made their way to Greece and were rebranded as gyros (of course, no Greek would dare eat anything with a Turkish name).  In the 1970s, a pair of Greek immigrants in Chicago started to market the living hell out of gyros, and the sandwiches—gyros, doner kebabs, or whatever you want to call them—became a huge hit in the United States.

(I can hear my Greek father screaming now:  “No, Turks didn’t invent gyros!  It was Greeks!  In Turkey, maybe, but they were Greeks!  And do you believe everything you read on Wikipedia?  What’s the matter with you?  You have shit for brains!)

Um, yeah.

Anyway, I actually think that our Turkish friends at Eat & Go are being pretty damned smart by using both the Greek and Turkish names on their menu.  Nearly every American can identify a gyro, but relatively few Americans are familiar with the term “doner kabab,” even though doners have become the default it’s-late-and-I’m-wasted food in many European countries.  So the Turks are indeed trying to feed us Turkish food, but they’re wisely convincing Americans that we’re really eating a safe, familiar, Greek-American gyro.

I like them... don't tell Dad

The only bad news is that the gyro/doner at Eat & Go really wasn’t all that good.  I’ve had better doners in France, Germany, Poland, and South Korea, among other places.  The pita was dry and prepackaged and the spicy red sauce tasted too much like ketchup.  Then again, a place called Eat & Go is clearly trying to sell us fast food… and by fast-food standards, that gyro/doner thingy was pretty darned good.  Not quite as good as a Chilean McPalta, but better than anything you can get at Burger King or Wendy’s.

The meal was more than redeemed by the boureks, which are baked treats made from layers of phyllo dough and meat, cheese, and/or vegetables—imagine a savory version of baklava, and you’ll be close.  In theory, a spinach bourek is the same thing as Greek spanikopita, except that the Turkish version has a doughier bottom layer, and doesn’t feel as relentlessly crispy as the Greek spanikopita of my youth.  I’ll get disowned in a big hurry if I say that I prefer a bourek to spanikopita, so I’ll just shut up now.

I know that I’m supposed to hate this Turkish sh*t, but I’m actually developing a taste for the boureks.  By Midtown standards, a $3.75 bourek qualifies as a cheap and charismatic snack, and I suspect that they’ll ultimately be habit-forming.  Please don’t tell my dad, though… I’ll definitely get in trouble for this one.

Eat & Go
342 East 47th Street @ 1st Ave., Midtown East
Subway: Grand Central (4, 5, 6, 7, S trains) or Lexington-53rd Street (E, M)

Share

One of the very first fans of this blog was a gentleman named Brandt Maxwell, who is a master of quirky geography lists.  One of his finest lists (in my food-obsessed opinion, anyway) includes the names of the 10 largest countries in the world that do not have a U.S. restaurant devoted solely to their cuisine.  It’s as if Brandt threw down the gantlet in my general direction, before he had any idea that I existed.

Country #7 on Brandt’s list is the landlocked African nation of Malawi.  Malawi isn’t all that small (15 million people, more than Cuba or Greece but fewer than the Netherlands), but very few Americans have ever heard of the place.  If you’re bored this weekend, walk into your local Wal-Mart, and ask somebody where Malawi is.  They’ll probably look at you quizzically, think about it for a moment or two, and then point you toward the electronics aisle.

Malawian kitchen genius at work

But as luck would have it, my (American) pal Adam happened to spend three months volunteering in Malawi, where he met a brilliant Malawian HIV/AIDS expert named Richard, who then came to New Jersey a few months later to complete a one-year fellowship.  Richard graciously agreed to prepare a typical Malawian meal for us, even though he had only met me once, while eating Belgian food several months earlier.

I’ll start gushing about the food in just a moment, but it’s hard to even begin to explain how much we learned from an evening in a kitchen with Richard.  In addition to being a talented chef, he gave us an amazing education on Malawian religion and politics, African economics, the condition of youth impacted by HIV/AIDS in Malawi, and, of course, southern African food culture.  I could ramble for days, but since this is a food blog, so I’ll try really hard to behave myself and stick to the food-related topics.

Since Richard was kind enough to lend his time and talents to cook our meal, the least I could do was purchase the ingredients (and, of course, enough beer to keep us silly for the whole night).  Richard sent me an email with an ingredient list seemed almost comically short:  “We will need corn flour (mealie), beef for stew, some onion, tomato, garlic (optional), lettuce (or such type of vegetable).”

ndiwo with beef, in progress

And that was it.  Five ingredients, six if you included the optional garlic.  I’m a huge fan of simple food, but I was a little bit worried that something had been lost in translation, and that perhaps I’d bought an insufficient sack of groceries.  (Though just to be safe, I also bought a bunch of collard greens, since I had a funny feeling that Richard really wanted a heartier, cookable green instead of lettuce.)  Along with Adam and my lovely girlfriend, we spent a relaxed couple of hours in the kitchen, taking our sweet old time chopping the beef, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and collards into appropriately sized pieces—after all, I was in no hurry after eating Chilean and Swedish food earlier in the day.  Our Malawian dinner turned into one of the best I’ve eaten in NYC, despite the sparse list of ingredients.

ndiwo with beef, one hour later

As with any Malawian meal, the secret was the nsima, Malawi’s ubiquitous staple food, made only from water and “mealie meal”—also known as ufa or white cornmeal.  The process sounds simple enough:  heat a pot of water, and then stir the mealie meal in, one spoonful at a time.  Once the nsima reaches the correct consistency, all you need to do is let chunks of it cool until it’s appropriately congealed into workable balls of love.  The nsima is then used to scoop up some sort of ndiwo (literally “relish”, though most Americans

would probably think of ndiwo as a thickened stew, made from nearly any type of meat or vegetable).

As we watched Richard work his magic, it seemed that making good nsima was actually pretty darned difficult.  Ideally, a good nsima should hold its shape, but have a smooth consistency.  If the water isn’t the right temperature, lumps will form.  If the cook doesn’t stir constantly or if the mealie is added too quickly, more lumps will form.  If the cook uses too much water, the nsima will fail to hold its shape.  If the cook uses too much mealie, then the nsima might become too firm to eat.

Nsima can be extremely serious business in Malawi.  For many Malawians, no meal is complete without nsima, and men have

been known to select their brides largely based on the quality of their nsima.  Woe be unto the foreign visitor who insults nsima:  a few years ago, a British teacher in Malawi dared to insult nsima on her blog, calling it “the most disgusting and pointless food in the history of the world.”

Wow, that was a bad move.  Many of the comments on her post were homicidal:

I know who the bloody naughty mzungu girl is and me as Malawian can not let some stupid mzungu demean us on our own soil. Over our dead body. You will hear it in the news. Enough is enough!

l have a strong opinion that you suffer from syphillis or you have once fallen in a toilet tank. please leave our country and never return.we will deal with u idiot.

I hope the police get hold of her ASAP before we angry malawians break her bones,as her address and mobile number are posted on her blog.

And my personal favorites…

Let her go back to her country where they kiss dogs. It is disgusting to us too.

Behead the wicked one. Those who insult our nsima and its delicacies do not deserve to live.

So now you know what NOT to do when enjoying the local hospitality in Malawi.

Luckily, we had absolutely no reason to insult Richard’s nsima, partly because we wouldn’t have any interest in disrespecting Malawi and its beloved national dish, and partly because all three of us genuinely loved the stuff.  I have a soft spot for corn in all of its incarnations, and I thought that nsima was fun and delicious, especially when served with two amazing—and amazingly simple—ndiwos.

At a typical Malawian meal, diners wash their hands, and then keep the right hand a little bit damp to help manipulate the nsima.  You then grab a small ball of nsima, roll it around between your fingers until it gets pleasantly sticky, flatten the ball into a flat noodle of dough, and then use the dough to scoop up the ndiwo.  It takes a little bit of practice to get the nsima properly turned into a useful scoop of the proper consistency, and it can be hard to get the stuff off your fingers and into your mouth unless your hands are still slightly damp.

Once we got the hang of nsima, we all fell madly in love with the food.  Richard made a simple stew of beef, tomato, and onions, and another saute of collards, tomatoes, and more onions.  I’m hard-pressed to explain why, exactly, Richard’s ndiwo was so great—was there something magical about the combination of beef, tomatoes, and collards?  Was there a particular technique to the way he sautéed and simmered the beef until it was ludicrously soft?  Was it the rock salt or the garlic, or maybe some sort of alchemy between the white corn and beef stew?  I have no idea, but I spent much of the meal thinking that this was better than nearly any meal I’d eaten in NYC, and wondering what, exactly, Richard had done to make the dish sing.

heavenly... but coma-inducing

As we ate, Richard talked a bit about Malawian food culture.  Most Malawians think it’s strange and rude to ask another person what they had eaten that day, largely because you could never be sure if somebody could afford to eat much of anything at all; Richard thought that my food blog would seem truly bizarre to many of his countrymen.  Richard said that his countrymen—those who are fortuntate enough to have food on their table—usually eat only once or twice a day, partly because many people can’t afford to eat more frequently than that, and partly because nsima is so dense and filling that you always want to take a nap after your meal.

This effect is lovingly referred to as the “nsima coma.”  As predicted, Adam passed out almost immediately after we finished eating, and Amber and I had a really tough time staying awake on our stroll home… though that’s probably our own fault for eating far more nsima than is probably reasonable in one sitting—especially if you’d eaten Chilean and Swedish food earlier in the day.

This was obviously my first Malawian meal, but if Richard’s handiwork is any indication, it might not be a terrible idea for an enterprising immigrant to open a Malawian restaurant in NYC.  And no, I’m not just saying that to avoid the legendary wrath of the Malawian blogosphere—seriously, the dish was that good, even if the nsima coma put us out of commission for the rest of the night.

Share

who doesnt love a good Swedish food buffet after eating three Chilean lunches?

I consider myself a champion eater, but I was having something of a mid-afternoon slump when I took on a big fat plate of Swedish food at the Swedish Consulate’s Midsummer Festival in Battery Park.  I got home from Barros Luco at 2:45 pm, with a bag of Chilean food clutched in my hands.  Silly me, I ate most of it:  a Chilean completo (hot dog) with avocado and sauerkraut, followed by half of a beef sandwich and a generous chunk of empanada de pino.

I took my time eating the Chilean food, and finished my meal (or three meals, if you want to get technical about things) at around 3:30.  I promised my friends that I’d be in Battery Park for Swedish food by 5:00.  I was late, of course, and then we wandered around admiring the lovely blonde women for a little while.  We listened to some Swedish choir music against a backdrop of the Statue of Liberty.  The weather was perfect.  The beer was cold.  Life was good.

And then there was the Swedish buffet, which we finally attacked at around 6:00, less than three hours after the end of my Chilean feeding frenzy.  For a mere $15, I bought a heaping a plate of… well, pretty much everything that looked even slightly Scandanavian:  gravlaks, Swedish meatballs, beets, salmon sausage, potatoes with dill, Swedish green beans, a random bean-and-crouton salad, some pasta of dubious Swedish-ness, and… my favorite… picked herring!

gravlaks... considerably less intimidating than pickled herring

Pickled herring and I first battled on New Year’s Eve, 1989; I lost, and the herring was yakked all over my childhood pal’s bathroom.  It’s funny, I don’t even know if the herring was to blame for my churning stomach that night, but I still associate pickled herring with vomit, and I have a hard time eating the stuff, even though I know that it can actually be pretty damned tasty.

For the second time in a few months, I survived the pickled herring, and actually kind of enjoyed it.  But I was slumping pretty badly:  a man can only handle so many calories in a single afternoon.  I bravely battled on, however, eating several big chunks of salmon sausage (it didn’t taste fishy at all—actually, I wouldn’t have believed it was made from salmon if I hadn’t read

not fishy

the nametag before piling some on my plate), several chunks of herring and gravlaks (Swedish cured salmon–arguably a little bit too salty for my taste, but helped along by the capers and dill), lots of potatoes and beets and string beans with more dill (mmmm… dill!), some pasta (without dill, sadly), and two Heinekens (also without dill, sadly).

I was pretty proud of myself.  Despite the ongoing bloat from the Chilean completo, I managed to conquer the entire plate of Swedish food, with the exception of a few bites of pickled herring that I managed to pawn off on my friends.  (If I’m going to go down yakking, my friends are going to go down yakking with me.  Fortunately, nobody yakked.)  As soon as I was done eating, I jumped in a cab, and went directly to the next meal to complete my first food tripleheader in NYC.

Share