A friend of Canadian ancestry was visiting me from out of town this week, and I thought that it would be fun to take her out for Canadian food. Trouble is, I had pretty much no idea what the hell Canadian food is. All I could think of was Canadian bacon (which, for all I knew, is not really Canadian… kind of like how French fries aren’t really French), Smarties (Canada’s version of M&Ms), and… I don’t know, seal blubber-based delicacies from Nunavut? Or burnt burgers that look like hockey pucks? (I’ve been making that dumb hockey puck joke for a few weeks now. I had no idea that I would actually eat exactly what I joked about.)

I don't get it.

Luckily, a (non-Canadian) friend happened to mention a new deli in Brooklyn that imports Canadian bagels from a legendary bakery in Montreal. And then it finally dawned on me that it shouldn’t be too hard to find poutine, which is Quebecois hangover food made from French fries, gravy, and cheese curds. I always thought it sounded absolutely revolting, but at least it’s better than, say, seal blubber.

We started our Canadian day in Boerum Hill at the Mile End Deli, which I pretty much thought would suck. Mile End has received a fair amount of attention (and a little bit of ridicule) for its $2.50 bagels, brought by car from Montreal on a weekly basis. Frankly, that strikes me as being pretty stupid.

poutine, round I

After trying the bagel, it still struck me as being pretty stupid. The vaunted Canadian bagel was just a runty, denser version of a New York bagel. Actually, it reminded us of the bagels that you can buy frozen in Midwestern grocery stores. Not quite sure what the big deal is.

Bagel silliness aside, I actually loved the place. I ate a Montreal-style breakfast sandwich (arguably a little bit overpriced at $6), which consisted of smoked Canadian bacon (I didn’t think that Canadian bacon would actually be served in a Canadian restaurant… surprise!), a runny egg, and parmesan cheese on grilled rye bread. It was outrageously good–about as magical as a breakfast sandwich can get. Messy as all hell, but you just can’t beat runny eggs and fresh smoked Canadian bacon, eh?

We ended our breakfast with poutine. French fries, cheese curds, and gravy. I forgot to bring a hangover. Oops.

This was my first poutine experience, and I was expecting the cheese curds to squeak just a little bit. They didn’t squeak. The cheese-melted-in-gravy thing was pretty good, though. And fried potatoes are always good… which is good, since I ate fried potatoes three times in the same day.

Mile End is a lovely place, though. The coffee was phenomenal (strong Stumptown French press… much better than the Starbucks/Dunkin bullsh*t in my neighborhood), our server was absolutely loveable (deserved every cent of the $10 tip on a $15 check), and I kinda dug the communal table and open kitchen design. Mile End is the kind of gratingly trendy place that I love to hate, but I actually loved it. Go figure.

poutine, round II

A few drinks later, we landed at T Poutine in the Lower East Side, which isn’t really very Canadian at all. Frankly, it’s a Canadian-themed gimmick that serves poutine and a bunch of non-Canadian sandwiches (Chicken sandwich with green chiles and avocado? Soorr-ee, that’s not Canadian.) that are designed to be eaten only after massive quantities of alcohol.

I ordered an authentic Canadian hockey puck burger, otherwise known as the Farmer’s Burger ($7.75). It was supposedly made from beef, but it was hard and round and black, just like a hockey puck. It was served on a bun with a fried egg and (non-Canadian) bacon and (thoroughly non-Canadian) chipotle aoili, and it was all held together with a tiny Canadian flag (made in China) on a toothpick. I don’t know what that poor cow did to deserve to be turned into a hockey puck and stuck with a Canadian flag, but I’m sure that he (the cow) feels real bad about it. I ate him anyway.

hey look, they really do serve hockey pucks in Canadian restaurants!

My pal Hotrod went for the New-Burger Poutine ($7.50), which included ground beef (oddly moist… did this really come from the same cow?) and carmelized onions with the gravy and cheese curds. I have no idea if this sort of thing is actually authentic, but it was pretty good. The cheese curds still didn’t squeak, and the gravy was too salty, but I’m starting to see the genius of poutine… fried potatoes and cheese with some salty, greasy gravy. Hard to ruin and always pretty tasty, even if it’s not all that good.

Mile End Deli
97A Hoyt Street, Brooklyn
Subway: Hoyt-Schermerhorn or Hoyt St. (A, C, G or 2, 3 trains, respectively)

T Poutine
168 Ludlow Street, Manhattan
Subway: 2nd Ave. — Lower East Side (F, V trains) or Essex-Delancey (F, J, M, Z trains)

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I live in the east 40s in Manhattan, and I’ve always pretty much assumed that NYC’s (expensive, whitewashed) Upper East Side is a barren wasteland when it comes to cheap, good ethnic food. I’m sure that the UES has more than its share of great old-school European places, but I thought that I’d be pretty screwed if I ever tried to search the UES for, say, inexpensive treats from Africa or Latin America or small countries in Southeast Asia.

So I was pretty shocked when I realized that there’s an insanely great Burmese restaurant up there called Cafe Mingala. I’m just getting warmed up with this blog, but it’s right up there with Joya and Opa Opa and The Islands as one of the best restaurants I’ve visited so far in New York.

definitely not slightly disgusting

I was spoiled by great Burmese food in San Francisco (tiny Yamo in the Mission District and the legendary Burma Superstar on Clement), so I pretty much knew exactly what I wanted when I walked into Café Mingala. We started with the tea leaf salad ($8.95), a Burmese classic with lettuce, tomatoes, flecks of roasted garlic, peanuts, toasted split chickpeas, and marinated tea leaves. It’s about as intense as a salad can get without being unhealthy or slightly disgusting, and I mean that in the best possible way.

If you’ve never tried it, it’s tricky to describe the flavor of marinated tea leaves. Imagine what would happen if cilantro, parsley, arugula, and pickles had a baby, and you might be close. The salad is a small plate of food, but it’s shockingly dense–we were already starting to feel vaguely full after splitting the salad… and that’s not something I usually say.

fish soup doesn’t look all that awesome…

Not that the salad stopped us from knocking down a pair of entrees. Before going to Cafe Mingala, I googled “Burmese national dish,” just to see if I would learn something. To my surprise, there were pages of different sites, all of which named mohinga as the national dish of Burma/Myanmar.

I fell madly in love with the stuff. Mohinga ($9.95) is a fish stew with vermicelli, garlic, and some sort of thickening agent, usually rice flour. It’s served with a garnish of fried onions, more toasted split chickpeas, cilantro, lemon slices, and hot peppers. It’s a beast of a stew, and I could very happily eat it over and over for weeks at a time without getting tired of it.

…until you add tasty fried stuff…

Our other entree, classic myanmar phet-htoke ($13.95) consisted of pork and shrimp dumplings (a close relative of standard Chinese pot stickers) stir-fried with basil, broccoli, and snap peas. The quality of everything was outstanding–the vegetables were fresh and pleasantly undercooked, and the dumplings were perfectly solid.

But as soon as we walked out the door, we could barely remember eating the phet-htoke, since we were still babbling incoherently about how great the mohinga was. Get your ass in there and suck down a bowl of it before the Upper East Side decides that it’s too uptight to handle the awesomeness of great Burmese food.

… and an epic pile of roughage and hot peppers. Feel the burn. In the morning.

Cafe Mingala
1393b 2nd Ave., Manhattan
Subway: 68th Street station (6 train)

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As I write this, I’m sitting at my kitchen table, nursing the worst case of indigestion I’ve had since I ate Liberian food a month or two ago.  And that’s kinda weird, since I had what I thought was a very pleasant, tame meal at a little Dominican place in Harlem called La Nueva Flor de Broadway.

Rumor has it that La Nueva Flor has–or at least used to have–killer Cuban sandwiches.  And that’s sort of funny, since my buddy Carlos is a regular at La Nueva Flor, and he swears that we were eating in a Dominican place.

When I met Carlos near the 137th Street subway station, our conversation went something like this:

Carlos:  What kind of food do you want?

Me:  “What kinda food you got around here?”

Carlos:  “Dominican.”

Me:  “Okay.”

funny how even Dominican restaurants have kinky Greek sh*t on their coffeecups

He didn’t say a word about the place being Cuban, so I suspect that the posts about the place here and here and here might be mistaken in calling La Nueva Flor de Broadway (and its defunct predecessor La Flor de Broadway) a Cuban restaurant.  Either that, or my buddy Carlos is a very clueless Colombian.

In any case, La Nueva Flor is a tidy little diner-type place, with a steam table lurking behind the counter, loaded with Latin lunch treats:  white rice, yellow rice, black beans, brown beans, a couple of different editions of chicken, a plate or two of beef, some tripey-looking stuff, and a pan of something that resembled stewed swordfish steaks with large chunks of peppers and onions.  I looked to Carlos for advice, since he is wise in the ways of La Nueva Flor:

Me (about as bright as a box of hammers if I haven’t had lunch yet):  “Dude, is that fish?”

Carlos (looking at me as though I’m far dumber than a box of hammers):  “Uh, yeah.  Looks like it.”

Me:  “How’s the fish here?”

Carlos:  “I always order beef.”

Me:  “Oh, sh*t.”

So I ordered stewed chicken (pollo guisado).  It was absolutely delicious, and was served with more fried (sweet) plantains than I should eat in one sitting, especially since that same meal included an epic heap of yellow (translation:  greasy, salty, beautiful) rice, black beans, and chicken.  Now I’m paying for my fried plantain transgressions.  Nothing that an economy-size bottle of pepto can’t cure.  It’s not as bad as Montezuma’s revenge (I’m not sure that I technically had Montezuma’s revenge, but I did a lot of projectile vomiting in Mexico one summer–it counts, right?), so let’s call it Sammy Sosa’s revenge.  (For the record, I have no idea why Sammy Sosa would want to take revenge on me.)

Anyway, the food was great, and we paid a grand total of $16 for two heaping plates of (non-fish) food, a pair of sodas, and two gigantic shots of espresso (highly recommended).  If you’re looking for Cuban sandwiches or Dominican lunch plates or… well, even if you have no idea what you’re looking for, you could do much worse than stopping in here.

La Nueva Flor de Broadway
3395 Broadway, Manhattan
Subway: 137th Street station (1 train)

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One of my closest friends in NYC had a birthday earlier this week, and I invited her out to lunch as a (lameass) birthday gift. It wasn’t really the most altruistic gift, though–I insisted that we go out for the ethnic food of her choice, as long as she selected one of the 164 national cuisines that I haven’t eaten yet.

My friend is really, really adventurous. She chose Thai food, which is pretty much the new Chinese food.

Thai food? Really? You get invited out by a guy who will willingly hunt down food from absolutely anywhere, and you choose something that is on everybody’s short list of regular food options?

Then again, she had a point: I gotta eat Thai food sometime, right? Not every blog entry can be exotic, so there’s some value in knocking down some of the basics. So I decided to make this Asian Holy Trinity week: Thai, Japanese, and Vietnamese, in rapid succession.

For Thai food, my friend took me to Joya in Cobble Hill, and I think that I owe her extra birthday presents for taking me there. We chomped through chicken-avocado summer rolls (painfully good, though of dubious authenticity–do you really find these in restaurants in Bangkok or Phuket?), pad thai (unadventuous, but mind-numbingly well-executed), and spicy thai noodles with chicken (pretty much orgasmic).

In the interest of space, I’ll keep my effusiveness to a minimum, but Joya is an almost incomprehensibly amazing place. It’s a casually elegant restaurant, with gorgeous bathrooms, tasteful decorations, tons of natural light, an open kitchen, and a full bar. And it’s cheap as hell, and serves some of the best Thai food I’ve eaten in the United States. Easily one of the best restaurants I’ve been to thus far in New York.

For Japanese food the next day, I was less fortunate. I randomly selected a tiny Japanese place in the East Village called Ikura Sushi. In preparation for a sushi lunch, I ate a slice of pepperoni pizza on my way there. I love sushi, but I have an obnoxious appetite (not unlike the porcine character in the upper-left corner of your screen), and I’ll inevitably leave a Japanese restaurant hungry unless I either A) order two bento boxes and eat them both, or B) have a hearty, greasy snack before going out for sushi. I went for option B this time, since it was cheaper that way.

I felt very smart for doing that. Ikura is a cute little four-table operation, and it’s entirely possible that they serve the freshest, bestest sashimi in town.

pork and veggies over rice at Boi... maybe not better than sex, but definitely better than bad salmon

But the salmon teriyaki bento box? Pretty frightening. Eating two of them would have been excruciatingly painful.

The miso soup and California rolls were fine… but then again, they’re hard to screw up. Salmon teriyaki is also pretty hard to screw up, but Ikura managed. It came out on a steaming metal pan, which I thought was a great touch. I like sizzling sounds, so I was very excited. But then the teriyaki sauce turned into a burnt-tasting black goo (think Pennzoil) before I even had a chance to take more than a few bites, and it pretty much ruined the meal for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I ate the whole thing (oink!). Salmon teriyaki is like sex for me–unless it’s completely rancid, it’s usually pretty good–but I sure as hell wouldn’t go out of my way to return to Ikura. In a neighborhood with Japanese haunts on nearly every corner, I would think that Ikura would do better.

The next day, I completed my Asian trifecta with a trip to Boi To Go, which is always outrageously good. In all honesty, Boi To Go (along with its siblings–Boi Sandwich Shop and the

well, pretty much everything here is better than rancid salmon

original, full-service Boi Restaurant) is the best thing that Midtown East has going for it. In a neighborhood stuffed with Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and empty suits and mediocre corner store buffets and Subway sandwiches and lots of places that I can’t afford, Boi is a shining beacon of Vietnamese joy.

I could very happily eat Vietnamese food every day for the rest of my life, and Boi covers the basics: pho, spring rolls, and lots of bahn mi derivatives. Want curried meatballs over rice? Chicken with pate and avocado on French/Vietnamese bread? Obscenely good pork on a (disturbingly non-Vietnamese) tortilla? They’ve got you covered.

If it weren’t for Boi, I’d probably go slightly crazy on a Midtown diet of Starbucks coffee and Subway footlongs. Thank you dear Boi, for preventing me from turning into a mentally unstable, smaller-boned version of Jared.

Joya
215 Court Street, Brooklyn
Subway: Berget Street (F, G trains)

Ikura Sushi
222 1st Avenue, Manhattan
Subway: 1st Ave. station (L train)

Boi To Go
800 2nd Ave., Manhattan
Subway: Grand Central station (4, 5, 6, 7, S trains)

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As you might have guessed from a previous food blog post, I’m half Greek. (Insert joke here about how only the bottom half is Greek.) A friend of mine happens to be Persian, and he was kind enough to be our Persian food tour guide this week. He took us (by “us,” I mean a beefy Puerto Rican, a certain half-Greek guy, and a random white dude from Nebraska) to Ravagh, a great little place on 30^th and Madison in NYC.  We forced the poor Persian to play food dictator for the table, and he chose all of our dishes for us.

As I gazed lovingly at a big plate of kabobs and pita bread and salad and a bowl of cucumber-yogurt sauce, I had one of those little déjà vu moments. Couldn’t we have been eating Greek food at that moment? Kabobs? Greeks invented those. Cucumber-yogurt sauce with dill?  Yup, that’s called tsadziki sauce in Greek cuisine, and I’m sure that Greeks invented it. Pita bread? Yeah, totally ours.

I’m full of crap, obviously. Certainly, there are some differences between Greek and Persian versions of all of these dishes, and only a crazy arrogant Greek would claim that we invented any of these things. (Hm, I think I just insulted my late grandmother, who insisted that banana splits were invented in ancient Greece.)

That said, there are tons of similarities, and that might have something to do with the fact that Persians and Greeks took turns ruling each other for much of antiquity, before we shared a few centuries under the thumb of the Ottoman Turks. I’m not a historian, but the Persian Empire ruled parts of Greece for more than 150 years, Greeks (under Alexander, then under the Seleucid Empire) controlled parts of Persia for another few centuries, and then the Romans and Ottomans took turns controlling swaths of both Greece and Persia.

The way I see it, we’ve all been eating from the same slop buckets for a couple of millennia now, and we’re pretty much food brothers at this point.

not salad

So, back to Ravagh.  Our Persian leader started us off with a salad (just lettuce, tomato, onion, and low-quality cucumbers… not even the cucumber-like product of Mexico that Trader Joe’s calls “Persian cucumbers”) that sorely lacked any sort of spunk.  The salad desperately could have used a few kalamata olives and some feta cheese, but that’s fine.  We really weren’t there for the salad.

Our Persian leader also ordered an absolutely brilliant dish called tahdeeg, which centers on a crust of overcooked rice salvaged from the bottom of a pan.  The crispy rice “accident patty” (much better than many things that could be called “accident patties”) is then topped with various tasty mushy dishes—in our case, we had a red lentil topping similar to a mellow version of Indian daal, and a spinach-based edition.  All very solid.

tahdeeg, version II

Actually, “solid” is probably an understatement.  I thought that the tahdeeg was a stroke of genius (and this blogger loves tahdeeg enough to name her food blog after the stuff).  I haven’t found any evidence to support my little theory, but I’m pretty sure that the dish was born from household inevitability—what do you do with the crusty rice stuck to the bottom of the pan?  Some brilliant Persian women apparently decided to just pretend that the rice was a cracker of sorts, and re-branded it as a delicacy.  Nicely done, brilliant ancient Persian ladies!

The main event, of course, consisted of kabobs, rice, and pita bread, much like you could get at a Greek or Bosnian restaurant.  There were a few interesting differences at Ravagh, however. Persians are apparently in the habit of serving plates of kabobs with pita underneath it, so that the pita absorbs the (disturbingly tasty) meat juices—another stroke of genius by Persian kitchen gods/goddesses.  The rice was a little bit on the plain side, compared with that served in other national cuisines; Greeks serve huge, bloated kernels of rice that look like orzo pasta, and they tend to soak the rice in olive oil.  Persian rice is often a little bit more delicate than the Greek variety; there was only a mild amount of oil added for flavor at Ravagh, which was absolutely fine—it allowed the kabobs to be the focal point of the meal.

no really: the soggy pita carpet is the best part

And the kabobs themselves were spectacular.  We had chicken breast kabobs (sorry, I was just looking for an excuse to use the word “breast” in a post… and while I’m on the topic, did you see Hilary Swank’s crazyass dress at the Oscars?), steak kabobs, ground beef kabobs, and ground chicken kabobs.  All of these were stellar—high-quality meat, perfectly grilled and seasoned, not too grisly or fatty.  Kabobs are common enough fare that it’s tough for them to be truly mind-blowing, but I always appreciate good execution of a meal like this.

But wait, there’s more.  Our Puerto Rican humbly requested that our Persian leader choose a non-kabob entrée, and the Persian leader bestowed upon us khoresh fesenjan, a thick pomegranate-based stew with a few large lumps of chicken breast. (There’s that word again!  While we’re on the topic, does anybody else wonder how it is that chickens have such large breasts?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to call it “chicken chest meat”?)  The stew itself had the texture of a good Mexican mole sauce, but had a very gentle sweetness to it.  It went wonderfully with both the rice and the kabobs, and I have a funny feeling that the khoresh fesenjan was just the tip of the Persian stew iceberg.

I could fawn over the kabobs for a few more paragraphs, but I also know that I could walk into a good Greek, Afghan, Uzbek, or Turkish restaurant (among many other nationalities), and also encounter insanely good kabobs.  Screw the great American chili cook-offs:  somebody should sponsor an international kabob smackdown.

And I’ll place my bets now:  the Persians might win, just because of the meat juice-soaked pita bread.

Ravagh Persian Grill
11 East 30th Street, Manhattan
Subway: 28th Street at Broadway (R, W train) or 28th Street at Lexington (6 train)

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