I was pretty excited when a rare purveyor of relatively obscure ethnic food showed up in Midtown East.  Usually, Midtown East is a sterile land of Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, lame corner delis, Starbucks, nondescript pizza-by-the-slice, and Starbucks (affectionately known to locals as “Fivebucks”).  But then a Chilean restaurant called Barros Luco came to town.

Except for one little potential problem:  rumor has it that Chilean food really sucks.

rumors of crappiness are mostly false

When I went to Chile as an exchange student in the late 1990s, both Chileans and foreigners were fond of saying that Chile was South America’s version of Great Britain:  the beer is warm, the food is cold and crappy, and the people are also cold and crappy.  Four months later, I was pretty convinced that everybody who told me that was crazy:  I thought that Chileans were unbelievably welcoming, and I don’t think I ever had a warm beer… although I rarely bothered with beer, since Chilean wine and pisco (an Andean version of grape brandy) were so cheap and tasty.

But part about crappy, cold Chilean food?  Definitely a small grain of truth there… but just a grain.  If you walk through the streets of Santiago, you’ll mostly see variations on American fast food:  hamburgers, French fries, fried chicken, and the ubiquitous Chilean completo, which is a hotdog topped with sauerkraut, mayonnaise, and avocado.  Cheap Chilean fast food was often served lukewarm and it was always served with mayonnaise, which is one of the very few food items that I detest—I’d rather eat pig intestines than a lukewarm hamburger slathered with mayonnaise.  And unfortunately for me, mayonnaise-drenched hamburgers and hotdogs seemed to be the national dishes of Chile… or at least the easiest foods to find on the streets of Santiago if you only had a buck or two in your pocket.

I wasn’t a generally huge fan of “Chileanized” American fast food, but I somehow developed a strange love affair with a McDonalds hamburger served only in Chile:  the magnificent McPalta.  “Palta” is the Chilean word for avocado, and Chilean McDonalds franchisees wisely created a hamburger slathered with the stuff.  I usually avoid McDonalds like the plague (notice that this blog is not called “United Nations of Fast Food”), but avocado-smeared burgers were amazing.

Chilean completo, sin mayonesa

So I had a funny love-hate relationship with Chilean food.  McPalta aside, I hated the fast food.  But there was another, absolutely beautiful side to Chilean cuisine:  the fruit was amazing, the bakeries were the best I’d encountered this side of Russia, and the salmon was absolutely breathtaking.  I pretty much lived on bread, cheese, wine, and fruit, with an occasional splurge on a nice piece of grilled salmon.  I lived with a host family that fed me fruit salad and fresh bread smeared with avocado for breakfast every morning, and I absolutely loved it.  I was crazy about pastel de choclo (a corn-based variation on chicken pot pie), cherimoya (a funny, flaky green fruit that I’d never seen in the United States), mote con huesillo (a cold slurry of barley, peaches, and sugar), and baked empanadas de pino (stuffed with beef, olives, onions, raisins, and boiled eggs).  Great stuff.

OK, enough of the trip-down-memory-lane bullpoop.  There’s Chilean food in my crappy Midtown neighborhood!  And that’s exciting, at least by Midtown culinary standards.

Perhaps foolishly, I went to Barros Luco alone on my first visit, and that meant that my urge to sample the entire menu was in direct conflict with the tragic fact that I only have one stomach.  I had to order a completo, of course—even though I never really liked them.  There was no way I would pass up an empanada de pino, since I always loved them when I was in Chile.  And since the restaurant is called Barros Luco, I felt obligated to try the eponymous house dish, a toasted sandwich with ground beef and fontina cheese.

not exactly a cookie, but it was shaped like a cookie before I ate half of it...

The completo ($3.75)—even without mayonnaise—was only a little bit more appealing than I’d remembered.  I’m not knocking Barros Luco here; I’m just not a huge fan of hotdogs on puffy, bleached-white buns.  It was partially rescued by the sauerkraut and avocado, though.  I mean, really, how bad is any sandwich—hotdog or otherwise—that has nearly an entire avocado smashed on it?  I ate the whole thing.  Do I deserve a cookie for cleaning my plate?

Sadly, nobody was around to give me a cookie after I finished my completo, so I devoured half of an empanada and most of the Barros Luco sandwich ($6.29) instead.  The Barros Luco was a fairly simple dish—just chopped steak and cheese toasted

probably better than a cookie, anyway

between two crispy discs of Chilean bread.  Tasty enough, though I’m not sure that it was quite good enough to be the signature dish of a successful restaurant.

Fortunately, the baked empanada de pino ($5) was far more impressive (though I think we’ll agree that “Empanada de Pino” is probably a less-catchy name for a restaurant).  It was a bit runty for the price, but otherwise it was exactly what a good Chilean empanada should be:  a crusty envelope of joy, filled with a salty slurry of beef, black olives, boiled egg, and golden raisins.  I may never come around on Chilean completos, but I couldn’t be happier to see a good empanada de pino liven up the Midtown East ethnic food scene.

Barros Luco
300 East 52nd St. @ 2nd Avenue, Midtown East
Subway: 51st Street (6 train), Lexington-53rd (E, M trains)

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I love it

It’s World Cup time, which means that pretty much everybody on this little planet of ours has developed a sudden obsession with South Africa.  Madiba, Brooklyn’s flagship South African restaurant, has unsurprisingly become the center of much of NYC’s soccer-related hoopla.

Of course, we were dumb enough to try to eat there on the first day of the World Cup.  Apparently, Madiba had been overrun by hundreds of people eager to catch the first game in South Africa, and those crowds had been accompanied by a few news cameras, as well as a gang of documentary filmmakers.  A pair of ESPN.com soccer bloggers/columnists couldn’t even get in the door because the place was so packed.

Luckily, we were too lazy to try to get to Madiba for the 10:00 a.m. kickoff of the first game, and things had calmed down by the time we arrived at… um, 1:45 in the afternoon.  We waltzed on in, and got a seat without a struggle.  Lucky us!

I’m about to write some mean things about poor Madiba, so let’s start with lots of happy, loving thoughts.  I loved the décor—who could complain about a massive, colorful painting of Africa with Nelson Mandela’s smiling face watching over the continent?  I loved that there was a massive projection screen with World Cup soccer playing on it.  I loved the friendly guy who took our order and brought us a pair of cold Tuskers, which is one of my favorite beers.  I loved that everybody seemed pretty happy and relaxed—clearly, the crowd that remained from the first game was still having a great time.  And I love the World Cup, especially when it brings a little bit of love to a part of the world that could use some.

I don't love it

Was that enough lovey-dovey stuff?  OK, good.  Now, I’m going to be mean.

I don’t like being mean, so it pains me a little bit to talk about all of the things that kind of sucked.  My silverware and plates had big, noticeable specks of crud on them.  (I flicked off the crud without saying anything to the servers—I’m not squeamish about that kind of stuff.)  Everything was pretty overpriced:  the Tuskers were $8, and were the only cold beers available when we arrived.  A different server knocked over my (nearly empty) beer at one point—and then stood it back upright and walked away, without bothering to apologize for spraying some of our overpriced Tusker on the floor.  Weird.

I love it

And then we received our small, mediocre, overpriced entrees.  Before arriving, I was pretty excited about ordering bobotie (supposedly South Africa’s national dish, depending on who you ask), which sounds like an Malay/African version of Greek moussaka (not to be confused with moose caca).  Bobotie is a baked concoction made from ground beef (held together by milk-soaked bread… yummy!) and topped with a layer of custard.  The dish isn’t really known for its beauty, but the combination of seasonings (tumeric, chutney, curry, lemon rind, bay leaves, raisins, onions) sounded amazing.

Sadly, we were served a small little cube of something that tasted like a dehydrated sloppy joe, topped with a thin layer of almonds wedged in a hardened béchamel topping.  It was accompanied by a small scoop of greasy yellow rice and a papadom, which was easily the highlight of the dish.  (That isn’t saying much.)  Adding a dab of extra chutney helped, but it was still a lifeless, uninspiring plate of food.

I don't really love it... not for $16, anyway

Our other entrée, pap and boerewors topped with tomato-onion chutney, was a little bit better, but still far from amazing.  Pap is a white cornmeal mush, not dissimilar to mashed potatoes (or Bajan cou-cou); boerwoers are mild beef sausages—basically, slender tubes of high-quality meatloaf.  It was a decent dish, but not amazing; basically, it seemed that we were eating a South African version of meatloaf and mashed potatoes.  Both of our entrees were runty and overpriced–$16 and $17, respectively.

The final score:  we had two beers each (only one of which was spilled by the server), shared two smallish snacks, had two cups of the most putrid burnt coffee I’ve had in years (and I routinely drink three-day-old coffee at home—I swear, I’m not picky), flicked bits of crud off our coffeemugs and silverware, and left the place hungry.  We paid $80 for two people, including tip and tax, and went straight to a coffeehouse to get some food and decent coffee when we left.

But hey—the World Cup is awesome.  And I love that South Africa is hosting the World Cup, and that we got to eat in a genuine South African restaurant in NYC on the opening day of the South African World Cup.  The food was crappy, but at least the soccer and atmosphere were a ton of fun.

Madiba
195 DeKalb Ave., Brooklyn
Subway: DeKalb (B, M, Q, R) or Nevins (2, 3, 4, 5) or Clinton-Washington (G)

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My recent Bangladeshi meal provided a little glimpse into the future of United Nations of Food. I know that somewhere around 50-80 national cuisines will be “unfindable”–meaning that no restaurant in NYC explicitly claims to serve those particular cuisines. But I’m convinced that many of those cuisines will be hidden somewhere. For example, plenty of Algerian chefs are hiding behind menus filled with “Moroccan food,” there are Central Americans all over the United States who claim to serve “Mexican food,” and I’ve heard (unsubstantiated) rumors that a chef from Burkina Faso runs a “Senegalese” restaurant in NYC.

might have been even better with liver

And it turns out that Bangladeshi food frequently hides behind the guise of “Indian” restaurants in NYC. There are very few restaurants that claim to serve Bangladeshi food, but if you live in NYC, I’ll bet that you routinely eat food prepared by Bangladeshis. Apparently, the vast majority (perhaps 95%, depending on who you ask) of Indian restaurants in NYC are actually owned by Bangladeshis—it even says so in this New York Times article from about ten years ago.

I wasn’t explicitly looking for Bangladeshi food, but when a Bangladeshi called me for GMAT tutoring advice, I told her about my little obsession with international food. She very graciously agreed to take me out for Bangladeshi food, even though we’d never actually met before that. Cool, huh?

Of course, we went to an “Indian” restaurant in Curry Hill, called Angon on the Sixth (soon to be renamed Mela on the Sixth). Most of the menu consisted of Indian classics, but my gracious Bangladeshi friend had a friendly conversation (in Bengali) with the gracious Bangladeshi server/co-owner, and we ended up with a few plates of legitimate Bangladeshi food.

I’m not going to gush too much about the food this time. We ordered an appetizer platter (a mixture of samosas, pakoras, and alu tikka for $5.95), but my new Bangladeshi friend looked at the plate with a touch of disdain: “I’m sorry, this is pretty much Indian food,” she said, poking at a samosa disapprovingly. “In Bangladesh, we fill the samosas with liver. It’s amazing, you’ll have to try it sometime.” (In case you’re curious, I loved the samosas, even if they weren’t particularly Bangladeshi.)

yo, Bangladeshis: stop hiding

For our entrees, we ordered shrimp dopeaja ($10.95), which is a Bangladeshi specialty consisting of shrimp cooked in a deeply onion-y red sauce, and khichury ($10.95), a delicious rice/lentil/chicken/onion dish. At a glance, the khichury resembles a standard biryani/fried rice hybrid, but it was surprisingly light and dry, without the oily finish of many similar dishes. My Bangladeshi companion swore that the food wasn’t the best representation of Bangladeshi cuisine, but I thought that both entrees were perfectly solid. We finished the meal with a nice cup of milky South Asian chai, which was (unsurprisingly) amazing.

OK, enough about the food and tea. Here’s the thing: what the hell is up with the Bangladeshi national restaurant performance anxiety? If most of the great South Asian chefs/restaurateurs in NYC are actually Bangladeshi, why are most of them hiding in “Indian” restaurants? Bangladesh isn’t exactly a small country (162 million people), and its cuisine is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a carbon copy of Indian cuisine. So why don’t a few of these great Bangladeshi chefs offer up their own cuisine, rather than just pretending to be Indians?

On one hand, I get it: Americans are familiar with Indian food, and Indian food is therefore easier to sell than Bangladeshi food. But there are plenty of adventurous palates in a place like NYC, and I’m sure that a great Bangladeshi chef could proudly display his/her national cuisine and be wildly successful, at least in this city.

So if any Bangladeshi chefs or restaurateurs are reading this, I beg you to come out of the international food closet, and feed us your own national dishes.  If my new Bangladeshi friend is correct, NYC will be a much better place when Bangladeshi liver samosas are as ubiquitous as burgers, burritos, and naan.

Angon on the Sixth (or maybe Mela on the Sixth)
320 East Sixth Street, Manhattan
Subway: Astor Place (6 train)

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roti with curry dipping sauce (only mildly fatty)

I probably should have developed this habit from the very beginning, but I’ve just started to consistently google the phrase “national dish of (enter country name here)” before heading out to restaurants.  In the past, this has led me to some beautiful meals—Burmese mohinga, West African attieke/acheke, and Barbadian cou-cou and flying fish, among other things.  Since I’m a carb lover who also loves fat, my chest was pounding with excitement (or maybe just the pressure from my rapidly clogging arteries?) when I saw that nasi lemak, or “fatty rice,” is generally considered the national dish of Malaysia.

I mean, what could be better than fatty rice?  Well, we went to a Chinatown spot called Nyonya, and found out that fatty vegetables are just as good.  Later, I discovered fatty jerky, which was also pretty decent.

achat appetizer (thoroughly fatty)

We warmed up with the fatty vegetables.  Actually, I have no idea if that’s really the translation of achat, but the menu said that achat is “vegetable pickled in turmeric powder and spicy herbs w/sesame seeds and peanut.”  The vegetables were really good, but also really fatty and spicy; imagine turmeric-flavored Korean kimchi made with a greater variety of vegetables and an extra half-cup of oil, and you’ll be close.

Along with our fatty vegetables, we ordered some fatty puffy roti, which is a hugely popular appetizer in Malaysia.  The roti was extremely light, not unlike a thinner, airier version of a Mexican chalupa; it was served with a delicious curry dipping sauce, which wasn’t nearly as fatty as the fatty vegetables.  Highly recommended.

nasi lemak, or "fatty rice" (blissfully fatty)

Maybe he was mildly frightened by the fatty vegetable appetizer, but my pal Ryan made the very strange move of ordering a really conservative noodle entrée, some sort of unmemorable lo mein relative.  It had noodles, chicken, and vegetables stir-fried in soy sauce.  Not interesting.

I was much luckier with the nasi lemak, which I will refer to hereafter as just “fatty rice.”  The rice is called “fatty rice” because it’s cooked in clove-infused coconut milk instead of water, leaving an absolutely gorgeous greasy flavor behind.  The dish is served with bony spiced anchovies (I actually thought they were sardines; the menu says they were anchovies… who knows?), hard-boiled eggs, shredded curry chicken with random flecks of bone, screw-pine leaves, and… drum roll please… more fatty spicy vegetables!

I love the little drawings of the chicken, pig, and cow (somewhat fatty)

All joking aside, the meal was absolutely delicious; like Korean bibimbap, nasi lemak is even better than the sum of its parts, thanks in no small part to the turmeric and cloves.  I haven’t eaten all that many sardines (or bony anchovies) in my life and found them to be oddly chewy and woody at the same time, but that really isn’t much of a complaint—I got used to them as I worked my way through the plate.

Once we left Nyonya, things got even more interesting.  If you’re familiar with me and/or my blog, you probably realize that I have a little bit of a love-hate relationship with NYC.  Sometimes I hate the fact that soulless chain restaurants and cafes dominate huge swaths of Manhattan, sometimes I hate the fact that I can’t see the sun unless I stand in the middle of the street at high noon, and sometimes I really hate Manhattanites’ obsession with overgroomed yappy-type dogs that leave runty little poop stains all over the sidewalk.  Anybody who has ever lived in New York can probably join me in moaning about the hundreds of reasons why living here is a pain in the ass; I also suspect that most New Yorkers have been tempted, at one time or another, to punt an overgroomed little yappy-type dog across Park Avenue.

spicy Malaysian chicken jerky (moderately fatty, charmingly gelatinous)

But then there are moments of New York City magic that make it all worthwhile.  As I was walking through Chinatown on my way home from Nyonya, I accidentally stumbled on a little store called Malaysian Beef Jerky that serves nothing but Malaysian meat jerky–your choice of beef jerky, spicy beef jerky, pork jerky, spicy pork jerky, chicken jerky, or spicy chicken jerky, all sold by the pound ($18/pound, in case you’re wondering).

Let me be honest here:  jerky has never really been my thing.  Whenever I think of jerky, I think about chewing on leather shoe or a baseball glove… or else I think about the jars of ancient, gooey red sticks that you find on convenience store counters in the South and Midwest.  Malaysian jerky is served in large flat squares, and it’s actually surprisingly sweet and tender, almost like biting into a firm piece of meat jello.  (Um… sounds good, right?)

I won’t pretend that I loved the Malaysian jerky, but it’s worth a taste if you find yourself in Chinatown and have a craving for some unusually-tender processed meat.  But I’m actually pretty thrilled that NYC is filled with such random places.  These little moments of NYC food magic make the city seem much more friendly and tolerable—and they greatly reduce the chances that I’ll punt a dog in a fit of Manhattanite frustration.

Nyonya
199 Grand Street, Manhattan
Subway: your choice of Chinatown trains

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After eating about 2500 calories of West African food on a Friday afternoon, I decided that it would be a really good idea to eat more West African food the very next night.  I managed to drag a pair of friends out to Fatima, a Guinean restaurant in Prospect Heights.

mmmm... delicious death-black baked fish with peas

Before I continue, I have a question:  why the hell are there so many places in the world that contain the word “Guinea”?  There’s Guinea (small, troubled West African nation), Equatorial Guinea (even smaller, oil-rich West African nation), Guinea-Bissau (small, obscure, Portuguese-speaking West African nation), New Guinea (South Pacific), and Papua New Guinea (about 1200 miles away from New Guinea).  And somehow, the word “Guinea” applies to a so-called pig that’s actually a rodent, and the word also functions as an anti-Italian slur.

While I’m on the topic of anti-Italian slurs, I remember eating a sandwich called a “Guinea grinder” when I was a kid in the Midwest.  Is that really an acceptable term these days?  I’d think that somebody would have gotten really upset about that a long time ago.  “Guinea grinder”??  Really?

The world may be very confused about the word “Guinea,” but the Guinean owners of Fatima in NYC don’t seem to be the least bit confused about their food.  Sure, not everything on the menu was actually available when we showed up at 10:00 on a Saturday night, but that didn’t really upset us.  We tried to order buyon, a west African stew.  Nope, out of that.  We tried to order okra (I love slime!).  Sorry, not today.  We asked about the fuyon, a close relative of buyon.  Sorry, try again.  Acheke with lamb?  No, no more lamb.

mmmm... delicious death-black baked fish with acheke

But at least there was acheke, and that makes me really, really happy.  Acheke, called attieke in some other west African countries, is a shaved cassava dish that resembles a hybrid of toasted couscous and quinoa—I had become hopelessly addicted to the stuff on our visit to Abidjan.  On this particular Saturday at Fatima, I couldn’t seem to find any options besides baked fish, and that was fine with me.  So I ordered acheke with baked fish ($10), and my two friends ordered baked fish with peas ($10) and baked fish with plantains (also $10), respectively.  Yay, baked fish for everybody!

The fish really didn’t look too happy when they appeared on our table.  The poor schmucks were black as death, with their heads still attached, looking like they’d been burnt into carbonized fish fossils.  Not the most appetizing-looking creatures I’ve ever seen on a dining table.  But those burnt-looking fish were insanely good, definitely among the best meals I’ve eaten thus far.

mmmm... delicious death-black baked fish for everybody!

It’s hard to explain exactly why the fish was so damned good.  Maybe it was because we were really hungry after lingering too long over beer in Bryant Park and enduring a 45-minute ride to Brooklyn.  (Speaking of Brooklyn, one of my companions has lived in the NYC area for four years, and had never been to Brooklyn before our little trip to Fatima.  We were very happy to pop her proverbial Brooklyn cherry. Awesome, right?)  Anyway, maybe the fish was so good because of the fiery sautéed onion sauce that adorned the fish.  Maybe the wise Guinean chefs used a magical spice blend before blackening the living hell out of those poor fish.  And maybe it was the acheke and fried plantains, which are officially my two favorite carbohydrate-filled side dishes of all time.

And maybe it was the atmosphere:  the room was filled with friendly West African men, all of whom were shouting and laughing and arguing while watching the waning moments of an NBA playoff game.  The food was outrageously good, but part of the magic was the feeling that we’d just stepped out of NYC for an evening.  We apparently landed in a charming foreign country where it’s perfectly normal to eat from communal bowls with your hands, talk to complete strangers with a smile on your face, and serve desperately ugly charred fish with the heads still attached.

Honestly, if you drugged me, dropped me in Fatima, and woke me up, I would have no idea that I was still in New York.  I might look at the fish, and be slightly terrified.  And then exchange glances with some random smiling men, and then I’d start eating… and I really wouldn’t give a flying f**k where I was anymore.  Damn, that fish was good.

Fatima Restaurant
789 Franklin Ave., Brooklyn
Subway: Franklin Ave. (2, 3, 4, 5 trains)

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